A Real Pain (2024)

Rated R for mostly language, which is throughout.  (Honestly, I was wondering if I could recommend this movie to my in-laws and the language might be the biggest hang-up.) There is a lot, a lot of swearing.  But the real troubling stuff is both the suicide stuff and the Holocaust stuff.  Mind you, you absolutely should watch a movie about people dealing with the fallout of the Holocaust.  Just know that the content gets pretty heavy.  While you don't get any on-screen suicide stuff, it is the code running behind the movie.  There's also some drug use and light conversation about race and culture.

DIRECTOR:  Jesse Eisenberg

I'm a little overwhelmed, but that's okay.  It's a good problem to have that I have too many movies to write about.  In a perfect world, I knock out all three movies I've watched over the weekend before I go to work while still pretending that I can maintain any objective degree of quality.  Still, I kind of love Academy Awards season.  (Heck, we can just pretend like I've gotten around to updating the Academy Awards page.  I'm also really dating this post because who knows when someone will get around to reading this blog!) 

My one line tag for this movie is "It's about time that someone got around to making a Woody Allen movie."  It's both an incredibly accurate statement and wildly unfair.  I loved Woody in his heyday.  This feels like Woody in his heyday.  It's a small movie, for sure.  But when I signed up to watch this movie, I wanted this exact size and intimacy in a movie.  I mean, I know that A Real Pain is going to be The Holdovers for 2025.  I'm going to rant and rave about how good it is and it will be largely ignored by the general populous.  But I seem to really like well-shot, well-acted movies that are fundamentally about relationships.  While there is an extended cast in this movie, the story is, at its core, about Benji and David.  Again, not ragging on the side characters.  They are absolutely fantastic and make the world of A Real Pain make more sense.  But these characters are there for Benji to bounce off of.  

But the title!  The title is so good.  I mean, I unpacked it a few minutes in and, even then, I was late tot the party.  I love that this is a movie about dealing with pain and mental illness without having to telegraph stakes for mental illness.  David and Benji, considering that this is a movie about dealing about pain, are technically on vacation.  Yes, it is a vacation with strings.  While this is meant to be a bonding moment for the boys, it is almost in the sense a wake.  It's the classiest wake ever.  Remind me to pay for my grandkids to visit my home in Royal Oak, Michigan to determine how I was the king of such a place.   But considering that this trip, in a weird and backwards way, is meant to be a trip about healing, it is really interesting to try to pin down what makes Benji tick.  While I can't imagine Jesse Eisenberg playing this role like he initially wanted to, Kieran Culkin does play the highs and lows well.  For a long time, I thought that this was going to be a tale about how David needs to learn to let go and pull his head out of his butt.  Instead, it is more of a commentary on the free-spirit archetype.

It's not like the movie is wholly original in its criticism of this kind of archetype.  Nothing shocked me about where the character went.  However, I did think that this was going to be basically The Darjeeling Limited in Poland.  While there's a ton of crossover there, this movie ends with a clear psychological victor.  Yeah, Benji grows a lot through the course of his experience in Poland.  But he's fundamentally the same person at the end of the movie as he is in the beginning.  Despite what hurtles he crossed (and they aren't huge), the end of the movie is actually quite bleak for him.  And David, who seems to think that his life is on track, almost gets a confirmation that his life is filled with blessings. If anything, Eisenberg plays the whole movie rather close to the chest (or the vest? I should Google that).  He never complains about Priya or his kid.  Instead, the trip --reflecting a fairly healthy outlook --is about the experience of viewing his grandmother's past.  It never feels like he's fleeing responsibility, despite the fact that Benji makes comments that David has created a substandard existence for himself.

Again, if the movie is called A Real Pain, I find it somewhat horrifying that Benji has glommed onto a woman who has struck him in the past.  I get the feeling that I'll never get to know the reality of who Grandma Dory was.  But that story about Benji being late for dinner is probably the closest thing that we'll get into figuring out who she is.  A lot of the tales that the travelers tell about family are all through the lens of loss. Marcia is still hurting from her recent separation from her husband, so we can only glean what Benji picks up about her.  We know that she has a horrible taste in men, but that's about it. Eloge also is the survivor of genocide.  He's here because he's almost defined his entire faith life around the notion that there are monsters on this world and it is Eloge's job to hold onto the survivors of horror.  Mark and Diane don't really count because they're the most blessed of the group, thus being the most unlikable.  Mark has no sense of empathy throughout the story.  There are moments where he's likable, but he's lost no one.  He's the one who has the hardest time connecting to these moments of loss. But all we have of these people is monuments and stories that don't really reflect reality. Grandma Dory may have been a great person, but the only concrete thing I know about the woman is that she hit her 18-year-old grandson for being late for dinner.  Don't get me wrong.  I understand that Benji is a little turd for a lot of the movie. But the fact that he values that abuse is telling.

One of my favorite running gags in the movie is that, as much as Benji annoys everyone for his high-highs and his low-lows, he's continually liked when all is said and done.  He doesn't even really hold onto those low-lows and the times that he's toxic.  He rips into James at the graveyard and James, when Benji and David are about to leave, thanks him for such good constructive criticism.  In the moment, everyone was mortified.  But in context of time, Benji ends up being everyone's best friend.  If the movie is about pain, that's David's pain.  Benji's toxic behavior is continually positively reinforced because people love getting positive attention from Benji.  That moment when David leaves the dinner gathering, that moment is because he's afraid for his cousin --someone he treats like a brother.  As funny as it is that everyone cozies up to Benji (despite other times being wildly annoyed by him), David sees the family he loves slipping away.  

It's so fun how road movies make every destination look amazing.  I mentioned Darjeeling earlier and then I wanted to go to India.  I've been to Poland.  I now want to go back to Poland after seeing this movie.  It's just this beautiful, yet small narrative about two people that doesn't do the typical movie thing that shows massive change through travel.  Instead, the boys are in a constant state of staring their own mortality in the face (being emotionally moved by the Holocaust) and digging their heels into ways of life that make them comfortable, despite whatever consequences might come down the line.  It really is a solid movie.