A movie with a resoundingly obnoxious leading character runs the risk of alienating an audience and turning it against the film. For every successful feature like the comic “The Cable Guy,” which stars Jim Carrey as a relentlessly annoying person and Matthew Broderick as his long-suffering acquaintance, there are hundreds of movies with an aggravating main character that have been rejected.
The new film “A Real Pain” announces its point-of-view right in the title. It takes a talented lead actor, a good director, and a careful screenplay to make everything come together so that the rambunctious pest doesn’t turn off moviegoers and send the motion picture into oblivion.
“A Real Pain,” which is playing in theaters, is about the Kaplan cousins, David and Benji. David is played by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film. Benji is acted by Kieran Culkin, and as the irritating member of the duo, he has the task of making certain he doesn’t derail the story.
Eisenberg’s superb “A Real Pain” reveals truths about the two cousins as they travel to a place where unspeakable horror was inflicted on humankind. David and Benji both have personal demons with which they have done, and do, battle. Through the quirks of the structure of their families, they are as close as brothers. Their lives have been different, of course, and their personalities are like oil and water, but they clearly have a fondness for each other, a fondness that is going to get tested as the movie unreels.
Benji is a cascading fountain of edginess and emotion. His past includes a suicide attempt. He is a bundle of energy and exhibits a wide variety of nervous tics. David is the traditionalist. He has a wife and child and is comfortable in his own skin. He comes across as a caring and careful person. Their personalities are robustly different, but both men seem intrigued, perhaps even interested, in being a little bit like the other. It’s a proper reality in the film that the cousins, who are very close in age, shouldn’t simply be able to switch roles quickly.
David and Benji are interested in their Jewish heritage, and they book a trip to Poland to discover their grandmother’s roots and to learn about how the Holocaust altered lives in a devastating way. “A Real Pain” was filmed in Poland amid historic settings. A Holocaust survivor herself, their grandmother recently passed away, a fact that has affected both men, but especially so for Benji, who was closer to her than David, and now, for deeply sentimental reasons, feels adrift.
The cousins join a tour group to Lublin, which is led by a pleasant and very serious Brit named James (a wonderfully engaging Will Sharpe). The small tour group includes four other travelers, who are played by Jennifer Grey, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes, and Kurt Egiywan. Benji’s raw emotions are readily noticed by the others. One of the many engaging aspects of Eisenberg’s excellent screenplay is that it doesn’t let the tourists become emotional pawns for the cousins. The guys must work out their own conflicting dynamics.
David, who clearly likes his cousin, is able to ignore Benji’s obstructive behavior, although his occasional annoyance and embarrassment does come through. There’s a missed train stop and a confrontation at the Old Jewish Cemetery during which Benji criticizes the tour’s lack of authenticity. He wants to meet actual Polish people and not rely on James’ focus on encyclopedic facts and mundane statistics. In his favor, Benji does connect with the others, who find themselves touched by his deeply felt honesty.
During one group dinner, Benji continues to behave inappropriately and makes uncomfortable comments. This prompts the others to talk to him regarding their feelings about his behavior. Their confrontations are delicate. This also causes David to open up to his fellow travelers about the complexities involved in liking his cousin. He explains that he has his own mixture of feelings: admiration, protectiveness, a tinge of envy, and even a little bit of resentment.
On their last day with the tour, they visit the Majdanek concentration camp. Before Benji and David will depart from the group to visit their grandmother’s home village, James confides in Benji about how he has influenced his life. The moment is remarkable in its importance, and it is one of the key points to which the engaging movie has been slowly building.
The film’s title, “A Real Pain,” is, of course, a metaphor from writer-director Eisenberg, who has created one of the best movies of the year. Bravo to his ability to deliver something other than superficiality.
Culkin will receive the lion’s share of attention for his empathetic acting, but Eisenberg is also excellent, singularly so, as is the entire supporting cast. This is a small, independent picture, but it is truly bigger in atmosphere and mood and feeling than so much of what is put on movie theater screens or onto streaming venues these days. Once again, we already know that moviegoers are craving this kind of meaningful entertainment with a flawless mix of comedy and drama. Teenagers should be buying tickets to see “A Real Pain.”
The ending, which gives Benji two options, allows the audience to consider their own choice for what he should do. You’ll feel an immediate desire to help him make up his mind. That’s how good Culkin is. The character’s obnoxiousness hasn’t derailed the movie.
Based on what we know and what we’ve watched, and because of Eisenberg’s premium talent as a filmmaker, what Benji chooses is, I believe, absolutely perfect.