“A Real Pain”: A Tour Through Family Drama
Jesse Eisenberg wrote and directed this film about two Jewish-American cousins who make a trip to Poland to learn about their heritage.

Summary
Cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland, to fulfill a wish of their late grandmother. The trip makes some old tensions and painful memories come to the surface.
A Guided Tour Through Grandma’s Homeland
Two adult cousins, with very different personalities and lives, meet at the airport to start a journey to their grandmother’s natal Poland. From that moment on, we accompany them on a guided tour that takes them to many places connected to the Holocaust. We are treated to some beautiful shots of all those locations, accompanied by many Chopin music pieces.
A Real Pain has two big focus points: Benji and David’s bond, and the Holocaust. Strangely, I felt the film kind of missed the mark on both.

From the start, the movie makes a point of highlighting the differences between the cousins by the way each one interacts with the group of people they are touring with. It’s implied that both men used to be close while they were younger, but not anymore. For the first half an hour, I believed the film was going to be a reconnection between the two protagonists as they get to know each other again in that new period of their lives. But not really.
The Holocaust, the other topic that I believed was going to be a major focus in the story, is left a bit in the background. And let’s be honest, there are plenty of better films that present people trying to make sense of what happened during that time, trying to comprehend the horror prisoners lived. A Real Pain brings nothing new to the conversation, and there were several moments in the film that I even forgot that we were talking about that subject.
The Character’s Usual Problem: We Don’t Know Them
My biggest problem at the time of connecting with this project are the characters.
Kieran Culkin plays Benji, the bohemian and careless cousin (and the star of the film). He is an extrovert and has no trouble talking to people. Despite his blunt and occasionally strange behavior, he ends up becoming the glue of the tour group, encouraging everyone to have fun and share personal stories.
I was fully expecting Benji to be the annoying character that becomes more lovable as the film moves forward, and we learn more about the relationship he has with David. But in fact, Benji gets progressively worse. One scene he is laughing and making people take pictures, and the next he is giving an angry lecture to the tour guide, criticizing his focus on historic facts instead of “emotions”.

The movie’s explanation for the character’s behavior, and his and David drifting apart, is that Benji tried to commit suicide a few months prior. The emotional drama is that David is very upset that Benji didn’t want to live anymore, and Benji is upset that David has a job and a family and cannot be paying attention to him all the time.
I see this in a lot of movies lately: they demand that you connect and empathize with a character, but do not offer you enough background to do so. We are told very little about the cousins’ lives aside from the basics, but it’s implied that Benji was already struggling before his grandmother’s death. So I’m not entirely sure of his reasons to want to abandon this world. Instead of finishing the film with a sense of satisfaction or feeling prone to reflect on what you’ve seen, you end up feeling the whole thing was kind of empty.
Critical Reception and Box Office Results
A Real Pain was released in the U.S. in November and, so far, has reached $8.229.859 in the domestic box office. In the rest of the world, the film is just arriving in theaters in some countries, but up until now, it has grossed $6.253.676. That would leave us with a total of over $14.000.000 worldwide, according to The Numbers. A Forbes article, published in December, reveals the production budget to be around $3.000.000.
The film has been nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film, and Best Supporting Actor for Kieran Culkin. The screenplay might be important for Eisenberg, because it is related to his Polish ancestry, but for a regular moviegoer like me, it was nothing to write home about. Culkin did a pretty good job in the role of Benji. Now, is the performance worth an Oscar nomination? I don’t think so.
I have to say that, out of all the award-season’s darlings, A Real Pain is one of the most normal films. But leaving that aside, I did not find the story or the characters interesting. Media can describe it as “heartfelt” all they want, but I don’t see the charm.