Film Review | Roads to Remembrance

Jesse Eisenberg’s Inventive and Serio-comic ‘A Real Pain’ Takes On Holocaust Legacy-Tracing, and Sports a Firecracker Performance by Kieran Culkin

Jesse Eisenberg (left) directs and stars in 'A Real Pain' opposite Kieran Culkin | Photo: Searchlight Pictures

A subject as categorically horrific and ominous as the Holocaust poses a challenge to storytellers seeking to find routes to conveying a human event so unthinkable and yet so persistently haunting. Last year, Jonathan Glazer set a new standard of Holocaust-related cinema with his stunning and chilling film The Zone of Interest, telling the horror story from just outside Auschwitz, from the perspective of a concentration camp commander’s family home within earshot (sound being a critical part of the film’s essence) of the camp’s deadly machinery.

Writer-director-co-star Jesse Eisenberg’s multi-layered and innovative film A Real Pain takes another road entirely, working serious themes into an often comic “road trip” genre format, following the trail to Auschwitz on a Holocaust tour trip. In the midst of the tour is a central subplot involving a reunion of former family allies — Eisenberg’s domesticated family man David Kaplan and the still-bohemian slacker cousin Benji (played with a magnetic madcap spirit by Kieran Culkin, who is, incidentally, part of the “Virtuosos” panel of the upcoming Santa Barbara International Film Festival, click here to learn more).

The serio-comic result of Eisenberg’s refreshing take on an “elephant in the room” subject encompasses the inherent urge to “never forget,” combined with the complicated moral and emotional dynamics of remembrance and inter-generational search of self.

Much of the off-the-rails comedic factor comes courtesy of Benji, embodied with an elastic madcap glee and self-destructive vulnerability by Culkin. His impulsive antics during the journey make him both an endearing comic relief source and a “real pain” (one of a few meanings attachable to the film title). He’s a genial disruptor in the group, but also an issuer of wake-up calls along the tour, as he takes the gentile tour leader to task for dehumanizing the actual Holocaust victims who can tend to turn into faceless statistics.

In the subplot arena, Benji’s ramshackle personal life and untethered sense of purpose or societal rootedness becomes a source of both concern and some wistful envy for David. Their relationship: it’s complicated, adding to the pull and pulse of Eisenberg’s probing script.

One of the alluring aspects of the film is a cohesive and subtle musical soundtrack composed entirely of solo piano pieces by Chopin, the character of each segment contributing to the emotional tenor and atmosphere of a given scene. It’s a subtle, but brilliant touch. Kudos also go to enlightened young Polish cinematographer Michał Dymek (also the eye behind Jerzy Skolimowski’s great donkey saga film EO). Dymek captures and savors the various settings and terrain along the journey, including the tranquil luster of the once horror-wracked landscape and an eerily, and aptly, quiet and ghostly still scene in the actual Auschwitz camp.

A Real Pain somehow manages a deft juggling act, dealing with a deadly serious subject underscoring a present-day ambience of mourning and remembrance, but with humorous jabs all along the way. Tragedy and comedy do a persuasive dance, on the brink of redemption. But only the brink.

See trailer here.