A Real Pain (2024) Surprisingly good Oscar fare from Jesse Eisenberg
“You light up a room and then you, like, shit on everything inside of it”
Oscar nominated at next Sunday’s 97th Academy Awards, I decided long ago, and for no real rational reason whatsoever other than I feared this film being a silly, empty and throwaway comedy that would no doubt just piss me off, that I wouldn’t watch Jesse Eisenberg’s second all time feature length offering from the director’s chair. Last night’s viewing proved how wrong I can be on occasion and my opinions can be just as untrustworthy as yours! We’re all swans in this game we call life, serenely and gracefully gliding along the surface seemingly without a care in the world and all whilst in the full knowledge that each and every one of us are kicking furiously beneath the water line. Is that a dangerous tangent from a man renowned for such deviations away from the main topic under discussion, or a hint towards one or possibly both of our main protagonists in a film that not only surprised me but greatly impressed me too? Who’s to say?
Ostensibly and wrapped up in an Oscar nominated bow, A Real Pain is a cliche ridden buddy road movie of two disparate cousins reconnecting after the death of their grandmother to spend some of their inheritance money on a heritage tour of Poland, a visit to the house where she once lived and all as part of a touring group or a “fucking weird family” according to one of our free swearing protagonists, as they visit places of historical interest such as a well preserved ghetto of the war years, the Grodzka Gate and in the purposely quietest part of a film overflowing with an Oscar nominated screenplay of barbed, sarcastic and explosive conversations and so many beautiful pieces of music from Frédéric Chopin, a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp. Written and Directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the film has a total of just fifteen credited roles of which only five are crucial, supporting roles to those of our headliners Eisenberg himself, and Kieran Culkin, with Will Sharpe excellent as the overly formal and fastidious British tour guide “James”, Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy a somewhat traditional Jewish couple “Mark” and “Diane”, with Jennifer Grey as “Marcia” and Kurt Egyiawan as “Eloge” particularly taken with the free spirit of the group and an absolute stand-out performance from Kieran Culkin.
“Benji Kaplan” (Kieran Culkin) We both arrive and depart from the movie in Benji’s company as he takes up residence on a chair in a New York airport that perhaps, just perhaps, he never leaves. A drifter, a dreamer, a free spirited force of nature who also seems eerily detached from a life and an experience he quixotically seems fiercely hell bent on defending too. He’s dismissive of a corporate world that has sucked the “moment” out of life, the joy of spontaneity and of being grounded in a real world where human emotions, such as the titular pain of the movie, should be freely expressed but have been numbed and dumbed down so as to blend in, to go along to get along and not cause offence or be in any way outspoken. For this is Benji: offensive, outspoken, opinionated, zero filter, and yet loving, caring, grounded, appreciative and most of all, human. The epitome of the life and soul of the (touring) party, he has in fact almost taken over the party and much to the consternation of the “brother” he’s estranged from and six months ago, a man whose heart he almost, almost broke.
Kieran Culkin’s truly astounding performance has been rightly acclaimed for the first of the film’s two Academy Award nominations this year, but he has fierce competition from Yura Borisov (Anora), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice) and the must be nailed on winner Guy Pearce for his incredible performance in The Brutalist.
“David Kaplan” (Jesse Eisenberg) Stressed, panicked and full of his own self-confessed OCD even before he reaches the airport terminal, David is also homesick even before he departs for Poland, leaving behind his wife and young family and a corporate world his cousin treats with disdain! Where once the cousins were two peas in a pod, David has grown up, grown wiser and simply no longer has the time to hang out with Benji as he once did and the brothers (Benji’s word) couldn’t be any more different or further apart. David is uptight and full of bottled up angst and even anger for a brother who almost left him but who also leaves him in the shade as he bitterly laments “I don’t wanna lose you, okay? You see how people love you? Do you see what happens when you walk into a room? I would give anything to know what that feels like, man. To know what it feels like to have charm. To light up a room when I walk in. But you light up a room and then you, like, shit on everything inside of it”.
At only the second time of asking and after writing and directing 2022’s When You Finish Saving The World, Jesse Eisenberg’s screenplay has been nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar this year but once again, he faces almost insurmountable odds in taking home the prized golden statuette from Anora (Sean Baker), The Brutalist (Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold), September 5 (Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and Alex David) and my favourite film of 2024 The Substance, written by Coralie Fargeat.
So I proved myself wrong once again and after pre-judging A Real Pain as a throwaway comedy without any substance, I was pleasantly surprised by a wonderful film.
Highly recommended.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon