18/10/2024 - Jesse Eisenberg continues his directing career with this seriocomic travelogue movie about two cousins returning to their grandmother’s Polish home

One of a film critic’s few prerogatives is to identify and name new movements, so here goes: we’re in the midst of a New Jewish Cinema, headed by the Safdie brothers, Nathan Fielder and Shiva Baby, where new generations, several decades removed from their ancestors’ trauma, are reassessing and sometimes reaffirming their Jewish identities. With these films largely emanating from the USA, the scepticism and re-examining of Zionism is also a key facet.

Once well known for his wiry, neurotic onscreen presence, Jesse Eisenberg’s successful move into directing with the Cannes Critics’ Week-selected When You Finish Saving the World and, now, A Real Pain places him squarely in this new tendency, although at a far less abrasive and combative pitch. Following two close first cousins played by the director himself and Kieran Culkin (in his first major role following Succession) on a trip to their ancestral homeland of Poland to commemorate their deceased grandmother, A Real Pain is a warm hug of a film, if slightly smothering, that hews to a formulaic script of catharsis and redemption. After a well-received Sundance premiere, the movie – a Polish co-production with Ewa Puszczyńska’s Extreme Emotions – continues its festival run at BFI London.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) Kaplan are two amiable, down-to-earth New York guys, raised on Long Island, nursing distinct emotional problems: the former struggles with anxiety, and the latter has depression and attachment issues that culminated in a suicide attempt. But with their Holocaust-surviving grandmother recently passed, they set off on a package trip to her original home of Lublin, where after visiting historical landmarks with their sympathetic British tour guide James (Will Sharpe), they’ll head off to visit her former dwellings. Interludes to smoke dope on chilly hotel rooftops and have soul-searching, stoned chats are, of course, on their personal itinerary.

If both Eisenberg’s direction and screenwriting tend towards the inoffensive, you can laud his work in creating a platform for Culkin, a ball of charisma, to excel. He’s a loveable dirtbag, clad in an eternal basement layabout’s outfit of a stained black hoodie – the kind of guy who reminds you of student or twentysomething-era pals and their once-hilarious repartee, who is somehow still not depressing to hang out with. And there’s an understandable, near-therapeutic goal at play: Benji was much closer to his grandmother than David, and clearly absorbed some of her pain as someone who could never fully assimilate into the USA. Even if he could never express it in those words, travelling to Lublin will be a curative life experience for him, and David, somehow better adjusted in a dull web-advertising job, is just a bystander to this.

Benji, prone to accusatory outbursts to other members of the group (who include a Rwandan émigré convert to Judaism, calmly played by Kurt Egyiawan), could also be picking holes in Eisenberg’s ultimately quite demure film, haranguing James for not providing any opportunity to engage with today’s Poland, and engaging only superficially with the Holocaust’s legacy. David and Benji’s predicament couldn’t be more identifiable for Jews of their generational age, but like a well-designed synthetic flower in a vase, A Real Pain only softly grasps this existential insecurity, overly comfortable in the crowd-pleasing house style of its global distributor, Searchlight Pictures. Its view of our current time, with European historical memory forever shifting, is like a mirror that airbrushes what it tries to reflect.

A Real Pain is a production by the USA and Poland, staged by Fruit Tree, Topic Studios and Extreme Emotions. Searchlight Pictures represents the worldwide distribution.