A Real Pain (2024)

[BluBonnet]

‘A Real Pain’ Review: Jesse Eisenberg Becomes a Major Filmmaker — and Kieran Culkin a Movie Star — in a Funny, Knife-Sharp Odyssey

More actors than ever are now stepping behind the camera to take a shot at directing. To me, they always end up falling into one of three categories. There are the ones who simply aren’t very good at it. There are the ones who wind up making a movie that’s A-okay (not better, not worse), often because they’re more attuned to the nuances of guiding their fellow actors than they are to the grander artistic machinery of filmmaking. And then there’s the elite third category: those rare actors — Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper — who turn out to be born filmmakers.

To that hallowed company we can now add the name Jesse Eisenberg. “A Real Pain,” which he wrote, directed, and co-stars in, premiered yesterday at Sundance, and it’s a delight and a revelation — a deft, funny, heady, beautifully staged ramble of a road movie about two Jewish cousins, David and Benji Kaplan (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), who are taking what someone calls a group “Holocaust tour” of Poland. The tour traces the odyssey of Jews over the last century or so, centering on the historic cataclysm of World War II. David and Benji also plan to seek out the home that their grandmother, who died just a few months before (she was a Holocaust survivor), grew up in.

“A Real Pain” is full of blustery talk about a great many things, and the suffering embedded in Jewish history — the way the past speaks to the present *— is one of them. But only one. David, the straight arrow of the two, is played by Eisenberg in a baseball cap as a vintage Jesse character — earnest and uptight, with a compressed delivery that expresses his nervous nature, yet this is no millennial Woody Allen caricature. Emotionally, David is a bit of a lox, but he has it together. He lives in New York City with his wife and adorable tyke of a son, and he works selling digital banner ads, a responsible and colorless job that suits him. It was his idea to take a week off to do this trip, which he’s arranged and paid for, mostly so he can spend some quality time with Benji (Culkin), the cousin he grew up with and was close to (their fathers were brothers), though the two have drifted apart.

That can happen, even with relatives you cherish, though in the case of these two youthful 40ish men, it’s a temperament thing. David is a sweet but conventional middle-class drone, whereas Benji is a loose cannon — a bro who never grew up, the kind of dude who says “****” every fifth word, who advance-mails a parcel of weed to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. He’ll blare it all right out there. Since he’s a brilliant and funny guy who sees more than a lot of other people do, and processes it about 10 times as fast, he can (sort of) get away with the running monologue of hair-trigger nihilist superiority that’s his form of interaction. He can also be quite nice, and knows how to play people. Yet he is, at heart, an anti-social misfit, one who’s clinging to the recklessness of youth just at the moment he should be leaving it behind.

The two are thrown in with the half a dozen other members of the tour group, all of whom are middle aged or older and quite serious about what they’re doing. This makes Benji the antic bomb-thrower and wild card, which is his comfort zone. He jokes and jabbers and interrupts and says inappropriate bro-y things. Yet he’s charismatic. People are drawn to the wit of his self-centered energy. (That’s why he’s spent his life getting away with it.) The film presents Benji as a version of the Magical Pest character — the one played by Bill Murray in “What About Bob?,” Owen Wilson in “You, Me and Dupree,” and Adam Sandler in “That’s My Boy,” the hellacious man-child the world should shun, only he turns out to be the life of the party.

Yet Culkin, for all his crack timing, is not giving a “comedy” performance. He’s doing a sensational piece of acting as a compulsive wiseacre addicted to the ways of one-upmanship. Benji has the personality of a hipster slacker crossed with that of a corporate dick. He’s funny, he’s rude, he’s charming, he’s manipulative, and he will suck the life out of you. Yet Culkin makes him real, and the movie, which Eisenberg has scripted with an ear for the music of ideas and for contrasting voices, presents the story of these two cousins — how they interact, what they mean to each other, how their past intersects with the present — in a way that’s so supple you can touch their reality. To put it as Benji might: This, people, is what ****ing filmmaking is about.

At first, Benji seems irreverent about history itself. Journeying out from their hotel in Warsaw, the group stops at a WWII memorial for Polish soldiers (who loom, in sculpted metal, 15 feet tall), and all Benji wants to do is pose next to the sculpture and have his photo snapped; David thinks that’s disrespectful, but everyone in the group soon poses along with him.

Things turn more somber when they hop a silver train into the Polish countryside. They all have first-class tickets, and Benji starts ranting about how offensive this is given what trains meant to Jews during the Holocaust. He can be a kind of left-wing scold, but what he’s saying here might almost be a page out of Milan Kundera. He’s moralistic, but he’s right, and the fast-talking action begins to sink into a meditation on our relationship to the past. At the site of Poland’s oldest gravestone, Benji chews out the tour guide (Will Sharpe, from “White Lotus”), a British chap who is not Jewish, for pelting them all with too many facts. He’s right about that one, too.

The film’s title, of course, is a pun. Culkin’s Benji is obnoxious enough to be “a real pain,” but the movie is also about what it takes, in a world conspiring to insulate us from reality and history, for people to experience real pain. Eisenberg unfolds the story with an organic flow, and he has a gift for interweaving airy comedy and gravitas — the unbearable lightness of good screenwriting — that’s reminiscent of what Richard Linklater brought off in the “Before” films. “A Real Pain” is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you. The other actors all make their marks — Jennifer Grey as a perky but mournful newly divorced Los Angeles “lady who lunches,” Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy as a stolid bourgeois couple, Kurt Egyiawan as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism. By the time they journey to the Majdanek concentration camp, the film opens itself up to sorrow and pity.

Benji, the most arrested person on hand but also the most thoughtful, keeps insisting on the primacy of history. The complex way the movie views him is that his perception gives him soul, even as he’s unable to apply it to his own life. He’s brilliant but lost, unlike David, who has found himself. I never saw Eisenberg’s first feature as a director, “When You Finish Saving the World” (which played at Sundance in 2022), but I can testify, or at least predict, that he’s going to have a major filmmaking career. As for Kieran Culkin, his performance in “A Real Pain” feels karmically timed to the end of “Succession.” He was just crowned with an Emmy, but he started off in movies, playing the hero of the superb “Igby Goes Down” when he was 19, and “A Real Pain” establishes that his fast-break insolence can work on the big screen in a huge way. The film’s final shot is a beauty, because the entire question raised by Culkin’s Benji — can he change and redeem himself? — is reflected, with haunting ambiguity, in his look. That’s stardom.

[BluBonnet]

Acquired by Searchlight for $10 million dollars (WW rights)

Searchlight Lands Jesse Eisenberg-Directed Topic & Fruit Tree-Produced ‘A Real Pain’ In First Big Sundance $10M WW Deal; ‘Succession’s Kieran Culkin Stars In Poland Road Trip Pic

The dealmaking has begun. Searchlight Pictures closed the first major deal on the ground at the Sundance Film Festival — $10 million for WW rights for A Real Pain, directed and written by Jesse Eisenberg. He stars with freshly minted Emmy winning Succession star Kieran Culkin as mismatched cousins David and Benji. They reunite for a tour of Poland to honor their grandmother, but older tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family’s history. The film will get a big theatrical release later this year.

Pic also stars Jennifer Grey, Will Sharpe, Kurt Egyiawan (Beasts of No Nation), Liza Sadovy (“A Small Light”), and Daniel Oreskes (Only Murders in the Building). and it’s produced by Topic and Fruit Tree, with Ali Herting, Dave McCary, Ewa Puszczynska, Jennifer Semler, Eisenberg and Emma Stone all producing. The film, playing in the US Dramatic Competition, has been a buzz title coming in and bidding buzz has mounted since its premiere yesterday at Eccles.

Deal was brokered by CAA Media Finance and WME Independent. It was a proper all-nighter auction, a throwback to years past in Sundance. Numerous bidders were in the mix. Searchlight execs Paul Hoffman and Chan Phung brokered the deal.

“We are blown away by Jesse’s vision and craft in telling this hilarious and profound film,” said Searchlight Presidents Matthew Greenfield and David Greenbaum. “He tells a deeply personal story and makes it universal. We can’t wait to bring it to audiences around the world.”

Eisenberg added, “Making A Real Pain was a true labor of love, and it has been so thrilling to premiere at Sundance. I couldn’t be more honored to work with Searchlight and to bring this story to a wider audience.”

“We could not be more proud of Jesse and this beautiful film, and are absolutely thrilled to re-team with David, Matthew and our friends at Searchlight on its release,” said Ryan Heller, EVP of Film and Documentary at Topic Studios.

Said the Fruit Tree camp: “We are the utmost believers in Jesse as a creative voice and were thrilled to collaborate again on his second film with such ambitious scope and themes. To have another friend and beloved collaborator on board in Kieran Culkin was more than we can ask for, as working with the amazing team at Searchlight.”

Searchlight is in business with Stone right now on the Oscar contending Yorgos Lanthimos-directed Golden Lion and Golden Globe winner Poor Things; and Andrew Haigh’s critically acclaimed romantic drama All of Us Strangers. Searchlight world premiering at Sundance the Laura Chinn-directed Suncoast, starring Laura Linney, Nico Parker, and Woody Harrelson. Searchlight has a long record of tapping Sundance gems from Napoleon Dynamite to last year’s deals for Theater Camp and Magazine Dreams, the latter undone not because of the film’s quality and performances, but because of star Jonathan Majors’ legal problems.

There has been a lot of enthusiasm for many films that premiered in the fest’s opening frame, with more to come today. More talk of deals than I’ve heard at this point in the festival, in several years. Not sure there’s going to be a record breaker like the $25 million Apple paid for eventual Best Picture Oscar winner CODA, but a lot of these films will find homes. Most probably won’t sell until buyers and sellers go home, because the dealmaking pace is much more deliberate than in the past because you can appreciate the artistry of a film, but you have to be sure you can market it and release it and make some money. But it’s a good time in Park City.

[BluBonnet]

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Balance Trauma and Humor in “A Real Pain”

By Annie Lyons

As Jesse Eisenberg took the stage at the January 20 premiere of A Real Pain, he received an enthusiastic standing ovation from the Eccles Theatre crowd, a warm commemoration for his ninth film at the Sundance Film Festival. The occasion also marks his second time attending the Festival as a writer-director, following his feature debut When You Finish Saving the World (2022 Sundance Film Festival). With A Real Pain, he explores scales of pain and intergenerational trauma against the historical backdrop of the Holocaust.

The U.S. Dramatic Competition film follows New York Jewish cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (an impeccable Kieran Culkin) as they embark on a tour through Poland to honor their late grandmother, culminating in a visit to her home before she fled from World War II. The anxiety-ridden David prefers to stick to the rules, while Benji is a frayed live wire, spontaneous and charismatic, yet in deep pain. As they visit Holocaust memorial sites, including a concentration camp, the pair try to reconcile their relationship with each other and their family history.

A Real Pain has a lighter touch than one might imagine from the heavy premise, and the Eccles audience had plenty of laughs to go with teary sniffles. Fittingly, that same energy carries over into the alternately riotously funny and reflective post-premiere Q&A.

Introducing his co-lead, Eisenberg remarks, “I’ve never seen a greater performance in person and maybe on screen except, I don’t know, On the Waterfront, but I don’t even remember it that well,” earning a sputter from Culkin and appreciative laughter from the crowd. Culkin shows off his own comedic timing when asked about his experience being directed by his fellow actor. “Yeah, that was a first for me,” he says. “I felt like there was a pretty good rapport right away. But then right after the first scene, he’d be like ‘cut’ and start giving me notes, and my first thought was like, ‘*****, I got notes for you too.’”

[dex14]

I thought this was great.

[dex14]

A REAL PAIN | Official Teaser | Searchlight Pictures - YouTube

[BluBonnet]

[BluBonnet]

How Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin found the funny in the sadness of road-trip dramedy A Real Pain

[BluBonnet]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2et8Vpu7Ls

[Jennifer Lawrence Fan]

So this is going to theaters and not straight to Hulu. That's surprising, but a pleasant one. As almost everything Searchlight goes directly to Hulu.

[BluBonnet]

Originally Posted by Jennifer Lawrence Fan

So this is going to theaters and not straight to Hulu. That's surprising, but a pleasant one. As almost everything Searchlight goes directly to Hulu.

I think they're hoping to score some nominations

Here's the poster by the way

[Jennifer Lawrence Fan]

I see it comes out start of November and Emma Stone and her husband are amongst the producers of it. Plus see it's only 90 minutes. Should be a brisk film then.

[BluBonnet]

UK poster

[MifuneFan]

Yesterday, I got to see A Real Pain with Jesse Eisenberg there for a Q&A. I'll briefly give my impressions of the film, as well as some highlights from the Q&A.

(Please forgive the poor photo/video quality. The combination of low-lighting, and my older phone camera wreaked some havoc)

The Film:

I really enjoyed the film. The first half is fairly light in tone, playing like your more conventional comedy road-film. As it progresses, and we visit certain landmarks in Poland, where we are confronted with the imagery of the war, and holocaust, it becomes a more sobering experience at times. One thing I feel the film does really well is to actually turn some of those otherwise depressing scenes into vehicles for humor. i won't be too specific here, but there is one particular scene involving a memorial statue, and the tourist group that I found to be really funny.

Eisenberg's writing is really great in my opinion. He knows how to write comedic scenes that are just slightly off, and sometimes a little awkward and weird. There's one bit for instance about Eisenberg's character's feet, and it just so random, but also the kind of humor I personally love. The wide assortment of characters in the tour group also added some nice touches of comedy in various ways too.

Kieran Culkin was incredible in this. He steals every scene he's in. His character, Benji Kaplan, is such a lovable guy, who can (and would probably try to) liven up a funeral, but is also so outspoken that you also can't take him anywhere. He just has this great energy, which can be very physical, with lots of playful hitting and touches, that made the film a joy to watch. His character is also surprisingly complex, and so much of the film's emotional highpoints, and social commentary are conveyed through him. The many ways he talks about his relationship with his grandmother throughout the film for instance, is just so touching, and authentic. I'm not sure if he'll be in the running for an Oscar here, but I think he deserves a nomination.

Eisenberg was also great in the film. His character, David Kaplan, is the polar opposite of Benji, so unsurprisingly he comes off rather dull and uninteresting in comparison. There is one particular scene however where David really lets his emotions come out, and it had me on the verge of tears myself.

The film also features some really nice cinematography. The DP of the film was Michal Dymek, who is best known for his excellent work on the film EO. It's beautiful shots of Poland's cityscapes completely sold me on wanting to visit there one day. The film was shown in Dolby Cinema, and while I wouldn't say a premium screen is necessary for a film like this, it did make some of nighttime scenes, and the lush landscapes pop even more.

If I had one complaint, it's that the film is too short. The movie just seems to fly by, and felt even shorter than it's already brisk 90-min runtime. I suppose that's also a compliment too, but I just really loved the relationship between these two cousins in this film, and I wish we could see other stories with the two of them together.

There's so much more to A Real Pain right beneath its surface. The title itself has multiple meanings. Many will just enjoy it as a comedy, but there's also an underlying sadness to a lot of it that you don't really feel, or think about until later on. I think the final scene of the film really sums that up perfectly.

4/5

The Q&A

This was a great Q&A. I've been to a number of them now, and Eisenberg is probably the most polite speaker of them all. He always thanked the person asking questions, even complimenting someone in the audience such a "generous and sweet" question. He just came off really sincere, and humble. He's also just naturally funny. I've done my best to paraphrase, and recollect as much as I could.

Story Origins: The story in the film is actually semi-autobiographical. Jesse, and his wife made the pilgrimage to Poland in 2008 to visit his Grandmother Doris' home. He was very close to his grandmother, living with her at one stretch in his 30's. That trip to Poland wasn't quite what he expected however, as mentioned in this video:

Possible minor spoilers in the videos, but nothing notable in my opinion. Apologies for the sometimes shaky footage

A Real Pain - Jesse Eisenberg Q&A AMC Lincoln Pt. 1 - YouTube

Casting Kieran Culkin : Jesse talked about how Kieran Culkin was cast. He said he never actually saw him act in anything. He joked about not keeping up with current shows, and saying something along the lines of how he's going to end up watching Succession when it's much too late, and he'll be bitter about it.

He said Culkin was one of many actors who auditioned for a particular character in Adventureland. That character was supposed to hit Eisenberg's character in the balls, and Culkin is the only one that actually hit him in the balls ..That whole physicality of his persona stuck with Eisenberg, and when it came time for choosing someone to play Benji, Kieran was just the perfect choice. Eisenberg was completely impressed by his performance in the film.

A Real Pain - Jesse Eisenberg Q&A AMC Lincoln Pt. 2 - YouTube

On having OCD, and working it into the story / What A Real Pain means: I was unaware that Eisenberg had OCD, but so much of his mannerisms, and his fidgety, somewhat awkward persona that you see in so many of his films are just a reflection of how he is in real life. He goes into his struggles with the disorder, but also reflects on what it means in the grand scheme of things. He talks about how everyone have these personal pains, but what is that compared to the holocaust, or war in the middle east, etc..So there's this real internal struggle of "what kind of pain is valid", which is where the double-meaning of the film's title comes into play.

A Real Pain - Jesse Eisenberg Q&A AMC Lincoln Pt. 3 - YouTube

Other tidbits: He was asked about using Chopin for his score. He mentions how much music licensing would cost, and jokingly saying that Chopin is public domain, so it's free. But also that Chopin is Polish, and it brought a certain maturity to the film too.

He talked about the DP of the film, and how they had mapped out all these great shots, and film styles, and how Culkin kind of messed that up a little. He apparently wouldn't stand exactly on his mark, and would walk around, and suggested other ways to shoot it. So, it apparently ended looking more Indie than Eisenberg and the DP intended.

He also mentioned Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy (2006) as one of his first inspirations for the film.

There was a good deal of self-deprecating humor, and jokes about having to lie on the floor for this or that question (like it's a therapy session), and some back and forth banter with some audience members, etc..He was surprised by how many people came out to see his film, and said to tell your friends about it, or your enemies if you didn't like it.

[The Great Owl]

Four and a half stars

David and Benji Kaplan, two Jewish cousins played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, were close as children, but have drifted apart during their adult lives. David is earnest, straight-laced, and uptight, enjoying a nondescript existence in New York City with his wife and son while selling digital ad banners for a living. Benji is the less predictable one, the type of person who is always the life of the party and who can often make everyone around him feel good, but whose underlying anguish and apparent addiction-addled persona can also lash out in unsettlingly sudden confrontational ways as he plows through interactions with no filter and with an inability to read a room. As these two men reconnect for a group tour through Poland, exploring historic Jewish neighborhoods and Holocaust locations before going off on their own to visit the former house of their recently deceased grandmother, their camaraderie is beset by the surfacing of buried tensions.

The title of A Real Pain, a 2024 comedic drama written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, is open to a myriad of interpretations. It could refer to Culkin's character, whose live-his-entire-life-every-day emotional boundlessness brings vivaciousness to the table while also making everyone around him uneasy, not knowing whether to feel sorry for him or to tell him to quiet down and use his indoor voice. It could also refer to a real genuine pain that we as a society are discouraged from experiencing, especially in an era where, instead of being allowed to time to grieve the loss of thousands during the COVID pandemic, we were instead ushered quickly back into oblivious consumerism, daily Starbucks indulgences, vapid streaming media television shows, and the “You got this!” toxic positivity of social media or church.

A Real Pain is not my absolute favorite film of 2024, but it is a high point, thanks to happy and sad moments that all have a tactile aura to them. Culkin is a revelation, especially during the final shot, but Eisenberg shines as well, especially during a labored dinner scene with the tour group. Be on the lookout for Jennifer Grey as a recently-divorced woman who is one of the tour group companions. Kurt Egyiawan is also splendid as another tour companion, a survivor of African genocide who has recently converted to Judaism.

At one point in the film, Culkin's Benji goes off on a tirade about how his group is going about the tour stops in too casual of a way, without taking time to delve deep into the suffering experienced in World War II Poland. Although I am not of the same ancestral background, I feel this to the core. Those who mindlessly drift through days of funny memes and mindless distractions without making an effort to understand history are doomed to repeat that history. Sadly, there is a distinct possibility that we soon will.

[Jennifer Lawrence Fan]

So the one regal a state over is getting this. But not my local one. Otherwise I'd have seen this over the weekend.

So it's odd what theaters get what and others don't.

[BigPudge]

Really good movie.

If Culkin doesn't get nominated, he was robbed.

Dude can be the light hearted comedy and turn to heart breaking emotion in the Blink of an eye better than anyone I can think of

[Flyers99]

I enjoyed this. Culkin owns the movie.

Good but it's so so so close to being great. They broach some subject matter and they kind of move on as soon as they begin.

Just some meat left on the bone. If I could cut 10-15 minutes from Anora and send it over here, both movies would be perfect to me

[BluBonnet]

Jennifer Grey is unrecognizable!

[master gandhi]

Originally Posted by BluBonnet

Jennifer Grey is unrecognizable!

I mean, she’s older, but I instantly recognized her in that Entertainment Weekly photo earlier in this thread.

Definitely plan to check this movie out. Looks good.

[Cherokee Jack]

This is basically Sideways visits a concentration camp. You wouldn’t think that would work but it does. As others have said, Culkin is the standout but Eisenberg has one particularly difficult scene that requires a light touch to avoid coming off as maudlin, and he pulls it off nicely. The 90 minutes goes by quickly so really no excuse not to check this one out.