A REAL PAIN (2024)

When Woody Allen became the pastiche artist of what he used to mock—the polite, the mannered, the high-brow—making high-cultured drabs like Interiors (1978) and Stardust Memories (1980) that were stuffed with plagiarisms of Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, there was the entire professional class coming down from their New York Times offices on Eighth Avenue to greet him at the gates. He was no exception. Comic artists of his generation had more or less tamed themselves into “serious artists” in one way or another by the end of the New Hollywood era: Hal Ashby from the crisp and sexy The Landlord (1970) to the slow and overly measured Being There (1979), Robert Zemeckis from the outrageously insolent and fun Used Cars (1980) to the offensively holy Forrest Gump (1994), Steven Spielberg from the brash and cartoonish The Sugarland Express (1974) to the stale and lump-in-the-throat exploitative Schindler’s List (1993), etc.

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain starts off where Allen has left, without having evolved from the wild, satirical edge that the latter had in Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Sleeper (1973). Having been a fan of his films since he was 16, and having starred in To Rome with Love (2012) and Café Society (2016), Eisenberg has carried over the worst tendencies of later Allen without the craft, but at the same time plagued with the unformed characterisations like those of early Allen without the wit and fanfare. If you’ve known him from The Squid and the Whale (2005) and The Social Network (2010), he does seem a little like a young Woody Allen reincarnated in modernity, but not any less slim, erratic, or insecure. But his comedic impulse has been drying up, like Allen did all those years ago. Too bad, now we’ll never know the Jessie Eisenberg that could have been had he debuted earlier—alas, something about turning 40 in these men.

Julianne Moore was far and away the best thing in his debut When You Finish Saving the World (2022), and her performance was the worst I’ve seen in any of hers; you’d mistake her for a Julia Louis-Dreyfus misplaced in a humourless psychodrama. The story was about her being an uncaring social worker mum who has a crush on one of her clients’ well-behaved son, and who takes him out to dinner and makes plans for him to go to college; and her distant folk rock live streamer son (Finn Wolfhard), who’s in his late teens but whose mental age is still that of a brat, who can’t stop bragging about his Twitch follower count, and who wants to become “political” to impress a girl at school but doesn’t know how. If you could see the farce in this synopsis, you may wonder why Eisenberg hasn’t followed the logic of his own material: a wondrous burlesque of family coming-of-age psychodrama.

These are characters that would fit just as well in one of those awful Saturday Night Live skits—so cartoonishly insensitive, and, with the audience cue cards taken away, plain dumb and annoying—but Eisenberg can’t seem to stomach the cartoonish; if his fondness for Woody Allen is any indication, it’s maybe the thinking that he’s above low comedy, that being a serious artist means having no place for comic irreverence. The problem is, he doesn’t make his characters any more sympathetic by dramatising their conflict. His screenwriting is still at the level when Allen was competing with Jerry Lewis in the early-1970s, despite trying to dig up deeper psychological layers that are not there. So his situations and dialogue are really just cringeworthy, and not in any pleasurable way like a Mel Brooks comedy.

Now here, Eisenberg has been stressing left and right in interviews how grateful he is for Kieran Culkin’s (Succession) involvement. He should be: Culkin was practically the whole show. He plays the zesty, unstable cousin Benji, opposite Eisenberg’s square, embarrassed, too-stressed-to-function David; and the story is about their trip to Poland after the death of their Jewish grandmother, who lived there till the Nazis came. With Culkin, A Real Pain oozes signs of life, and looks about to pull out a white flag that says “You can have me, Comedy.” He’s an incredibly physical performer—he sees the unhinged in his character and was able to bring it out of himself—and a kind of actor who doesn’t need much direction to do so.

An outlier, he’s like those nerdy wizards in elementary schools who learned swear words four years too early and have no filter, asking questions that’d never occurred to you in a million years, making sense out of seeming nonsense; and every time you’d be taken by him. Sitting in a first-class train to the remnants of a concentration camp in the company of Jewish tourists, he whines and moans in his spacious seat about how uncomfortable he feels being separated from the Polish experience then and now; journeying through a graveyard, he politely advises the tour guide to shut up if there’s nothing else to say than facts and figures, thinking he’s so righteous and sensitive for not reducing historical and emotional authenticity to names and numbers; when he’s drunk, curses about corporate culture shoot out the side of his mouth a thousand revolutions per minute, with no sign of stopping.

But buddy comedies can’t rely on individual flourishes. Eisenberg has seen the mismatched comedy duos of jaunty idiots giving cool losers the kicks to know better to not exploit the fun in him. I mean, it’s his wheelhouse. It’s the difference between whether he can and whether he wants to, and he doesn’t have to deal with the former. But his David is just that: bland, nervous, depressed, a father and husband with a reliable job who somehow doesn’t feel like any of these things (except the part about working for a tech firm). Benji laments David’s loss of former passion and drive, and in turn David looks as confused as we are: there was never any impression that he was anything else, that something’s repressed in him, waiting to be released.

It’s the Allen-esque self-hatred towards humour all over again. At what used to be their grandmother’s, they put two little stones on the porch (apparently in Jewish culture, placing stones on someone’s grave is supposed to stop the evil spirits, and was seen as a sign of remembrance), to be mistaken by the neighbours as a nasty trap for the old woman of the house to trip over. I mean, any sane human being hearing about this episode of misunderstanding would have laughed heartily. Not with the square-faced Eisenberg, who insists on being all respectful and mature: when the tension gets resolved, David and Benji simply packed up and left, which feels more awkward than their not understanding the neighbours.

Scenes don’t so much build as simply add on top of each other perfunctorily. When David was surprised at how well Benji remembers his piano lessons, or when Benji compliments David about his “graceful” feet, there was no follow-through. David just went back to his hotel and crashed as Benji played on, and at one point examined his feet curiously. Eisenberg doesn’t do what any seasoned dramatist would have done. David doesn’t send pictures of his feet to his wife asking if Benji’s out of his mind, nor does he go up to the piano to see Benji play, waiting to be asked to play with him together. We’re shown Benji making David aware of things in his life that he hadn’t noticed before, but it stops there, and we’re not let in on how David feels about these rediscoveries. There doesn’t seem to be any inner life or texture to the character that you’d be forgiven if you’ve forgotten that David is indeed a family man.

Eisenberg has said that he tries not to be “self-congratulatory” when dealing with the memory of the Holocaust. It’s noble of him, and his strategy seems to be to gloss over that part of history without much, if any, reflection, and to challenge the tourist perspective with Benji as his stand-in. But Benji says what he did not necessarily out of social concerns, but mostly as a front for his depression—his “pains”—that once led him to a suicide attempt. He needed something to project his negativities. It’s not it being merely a projection that it falls flat, though, but that the film presents it as being important and profound, when in fact his advice doesn’t make him any less complicit as the rest of the tourists. His points do make you think, but there’s a limit to that given his role.

Would we have gained more insight into his torment from his crying over what he saw at the camps? Perhaps, being symbolic of his grandmother’s having nearly escaped the gas chambers, it was a reminder for him of her life, and death. But conjectured interpretation is hardly proof of a film’s “emotional authenticity”. Perhaps, being the source of unintelligible grief and sorrow, the establishment represented for him something emotionally inexplicable, something that can’t be rationalised or put into words. But shots of the camps were so polished and square you are in no position to share his anguish. The picture is supposed to be about emotion, and yet it’s so strained it’s all but devoid of emotion. At one point, David breaks down into tears confessing how he feels about Benji, from whom he became estranged after the latter’s suicide attempt. We see his passion right there, and yet none of that pierces through to you. It might be what the whole business of not becoming “self-congratulatory” is about: we’re not in there with these characters, and feeling for them intimately and subjectively. Instead, what we have is façades of emotional breakdowns, leaving us bewildered as to how to respond.

Eisenberg doesn’t do anything particularly interesting with the Polish locale either, except at a monument of Jewish uprising, David, feeling stupid at the thought of being photographed, juggles with the phones of tourists who want to be photographed. If the urban poverty in Woody Allen films is virtually unrecognisable from the New York City you know, it’s because of the layer of lacquer he has applied on it to protect his educated friends from “feeling bad” or alienated. And if you’ve learned nothing of the Poland, the people and the culture, that you didn’t already know from Eisenberg, it’s probably his preference for using the place as a background paper for sharing his middle-class depression with fellow Americans.

If the trauma dumps didn’t overwhelm the whole experience perhaps it’s that they were merely mentioned in passing, viewed at a distance, and never explored. Culkin plays up Benji’s grief with skill and grace, but no power, and that’s not something he can deliver if he wanted to: the material simply doesn’t support him. We get anecdotes about his relationship with his grandmother, how he was glad when she slapped him in the face and so on. But we’ve all lost loved ones before, and we can’t pin down what exactly was driving poor Benji in particular (and not anyone else near him) that outwardly insane about her passing. Eisenberg may have worried too much about being exploitative, that there were no flashbacks (or any conventional device) used to elicit our sentiments, but he kept putting on a show of pity anyway.

The whole look of it is weirdly glistened, like those harmless and mediocre European comedies: terribly one-note and lacking in variety. But the soundtrack is easily the worst part. It’s nice knowing the filmmakers’ respect and devotion to classical music, but they’re also presenting the Polish culture in the image of themselves, as what well-off outsiders liked to think of: that of Frédéric Chopin, and not Lady Pank, Krzysztof Komeda, Dawid Podsiadło, or any modern Polish musicians the populace might recognise. There was a collection of location shots that present the remnants of Jewish culture in Poland, but there were no people interacting with the place; they’re like unicorns, to be cherished by objectification. As a celebration of Jewish and Polish culture, A Real Pain has surprisingly little sense of culture—Polish or Jewish. We’ve learned nothing new of what it means to be Jewish or Polish, except visitation stones and the collective trauma from the Holocaust.

POLAND • USA | 2024 | 90 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Jesse Eisenberg.
starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy & Daniel Oreskes.