Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin Create a Buddy Masterpiece

You probably know someone like David: early forties, has a steady job (selling internet ads), loves his wife and son. He is on medication but is still anxious and somehow seems both highly observant and constantly distracted. Takes the responsibility of adulthood seriously. Terribly serious. Maybe you are related to that person. Maybe you are that person.

And you almost certainly know someone like Benji: also in his early forties, but no one seems to have told him that he should be an adult by now. The kind of person who can’t help but say what he thinks, who exudes the spirit of the party, can’t help but be the most likable asshole within a 50 mile radius. Refuses to accept all that corporate-sponsored propaganda about ‘success’. He knows his mother’s basement well. On the plus side, he knows where to get real primo weed in the state.

These are the two archetypes – a duo with an ant and locust dynamic that would make Aesop slowly clap – who are writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg presents us in A real pain, a road movie that goes off the beaten path just enough to stand out from a million other stories about mismatched traveling companions. Which is funny, considering that most of this extraordinary, character-driven drama about reconciliation, history, the legacy of tragedy and that old chestnut about the past being never dead, etc., takes place during one of those group trips accompanied by a guide and planned down to the millisecond. David would appreciate the irony with a wry grin. Benji just punched you on the arm and told you to live more in the moment before sneaking up to the roof of a hotel and lighting up a joint.

Not surprisingly, it is David (Eisenberg) who takes this trip for him and Benji (Kieran Culkin). Once upon a time there was a very close bond between these two cousins. Now David has his family and career in Brooklyn, and Benji is just coasting through life in Bennington, NY. The latter has especially become unhinged since their grandmother Dory passed away, as she was one of the few people he believes actually looked out for him. So his cousin organized an excursion to Poland to honor her, which takes these two to the grandmother’s native country and culminates in a visit to the house where she grew up. It’s the perfect chance for these somewhat estranged family members to have some quality time together again.

Of course, time has only widened the differences between these two men, and once they join the tour group led by a British scholar (The White LotusWill Sharpe) who never met a footnote from the regional Jewish experience he didn’t like, the divide between the buttoned-up David and the laid-back Benji becomes much clearer. A real pain can serve as a de facto travelogue for a long-lost version of Poland, one in which a world of pre-ghettoization Jewish neighborhoods is paved but not forgotten, as well as a checklist of the tributes and markers to a mass atrocity in the middle of the 20th century. But what it really focuses on is a much more personal history that is not so much shaped by a forcibly abandoned Motherland as overshadowed by it. Both cousins ​​find themselves connecting to their roots in unexpected ways, even as they acknowledge an alternate history in which they both grew up in Poland (“where we have long beards and can’t talk to women”) that seems somewhat unfathomable. It’s their connection to each other that now seems more like ancient history to them, especially when it comes to processing the gravity of it all.

For David, that means a respectful sense of detachment, that is, his usual sense of detachment method. For Benji, well…let’s just say it he is a lot. Eisenberg has generously given his co-star the kind of raging id role that most actors could only dream of, and Culkin rewards his director/castmate with the greatest, funniest, most cringe-worthy comedic and heartbreaking performance of his career – and yes, we count Roman Roy from Succession. His Benji is like a ball of pure, undiluted charisma, joyfully inquiring about the lives of strangers and taking his fellow tourists on a photo shoot in front of the Warsaw Uprising Monument. (David, of course, is the one taking pictures on everyone’s phone.) The inner sunlight radiating from him makes the occasional storm clouds of anger and flurry of blunt, blurted-out comments forgivable, if not entirely acceptable. The actor plays him partly as an unfiltered holy fool, and partly as an adorable puppy dog ​​who pees on the carpet. “I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, I want to be him,” Eisenberg’s character says at one point, and thanks to Culkin, you completely understand all those impulses.

Culkin’s Zen stoner take on a free spirit who is also a broken spirit – an accidentally spilled piece of information hints at a backstory that suggests the film’s title is earned – would be enough to recommend this. But Eisenberg’s second time behind the camera also crowns him a true filmmaker. His first film, When you’re done saving the world (2022), felt like the work of someone gingerly making their way into an art form. This second attempt as a writer-director shows someone with an eye, an ear and a voice. There’s a sense of moving the camera just enough to emphasize a detail, framing a sequence in a way that suggests you’re taking advantage of background, symmetry and/or space without seeming showy. That his work as director of the film ensemble, which also includes Jennifer Gray, House of the Dragon‘ Kurt Egyiawan, David Oreskes and Liza Sadovy, complements the film’s half-light, half-heavy tone and is no shocker. That Eisenberg is smart enough to abruptly end a sequence in the Majdanek concentration camp with a sudden sigh and then proceed to an aftermath of quiet sobbing is anything but expected.

A real pain ends on the same shot where it begins, with a drifter in an airport, lost in his thoughts as the world moves around him. The second time is just as puzzling as the first, and yet we know these two cousins ​​so well now – and have heard their arguments and accusations, seen how incompatible they are, seen how their love for each other bridges the gap between their life choices – that what we read in that look is enormous. These two have traveled hundreds of miles together, but the healing can only be mapped in centimeters. However, what Eisenberg achieves here in its entirety cannot be measured. It’s the real deal.