“A Real Pain” Understands Grief as a Constant Currency for Intimacy

Jesse Eisenberg’s comedy-drama considers the impact and ethics of processing our pain

No one’s grief is exceptional, so why burden each other with it? Because pain is a constant that comfort can seem intangible without, and proximity to pain fosters proximity to others. In fact, pain is such an important constant that we have manufactured ways to translate it into a tourist experience, a luxurious parade of horrors marketed as a means of resolving the internal dispute between our gratitude and our grief. 

Cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) have grown apart since their childhood, which was defined by their relationship with their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who has recently passed away. David has a wife, a kid, and a well-paying job, but is inhibited by a variety of awkward anxieties, while Benji has never settled into nuclear conventions and is disarmingly comfortable with social confrontation. A Real Pain sees them reunited as they embark on a guided tour of Poland in their grandmother’s memory, tracing the history of Jewish diaspora, expulsion, and genocide across the country’s landscape. 

While David and Benji are foils to each other by nearly every metric, they are in the company of people on a spectrum of different Jewish archetypes — Marcia (Jennifer Grey), an affluent Brooklynite mother confronted existentially by having become a “lady who lunches”; Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), a retired couple who have consigned themselves to travel; and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawian), a Rwandan convert to Judaism whose relationship to genocide is lived rather than lineal. 

Through this collection of stereotypes and neuroses, A Real Pain directly questions the complicated ethics of becoming a spectator to one’s own trauma, voluntarily treading the same path that millions took to extermination while still always separated by a literal or metaphorical pane of museum glass. Benji is the only one who ever questions this dynamic, pointing out his disgust with their first-class voyage along the same train tracks that their ancestors traveled to their death, or calling out the tour guide for his imposition of anthropological monologuing at sites of mourning. 

David is subsumed by embarrassment during Benji’s outbursts, seeing his eccentric critiques and emotional vulnerability as an attempt to burden strangers with his own baggage. David understands pain as universal, but sees its ubiquity as grounds to process it internally in hopes of avoiding inconvenience to others. But Benji’s refusal to swallow his grievances or compartmentalize his pain allows him to use it as a currency for intimacy, sometimes destabilizing social constraints but always giving a voice to the unspoken tension that grows heavier by the day. 

Benji’s emotional honesty slowly transforms from endearing vulnerability to a tormented desperation to perform his pain as loudly as possible. In his efforts to undermine the tendencies of Holocaust tourism, he proves that he too cannot live in his own skin, though he’s a lot better at hiding it than David. By using his pain as a functional means of social transaction, he constantly keeps it at arms length, never willing to truly confront it along any internal axis. 

As A Real Pain considers David and Benji’s contrasting emotional compartmentalization, it also confronts the countless paradoxes that exist when bearing witness. The exhibition of a past genocide to mediate our internal disputes can so easily be manipulated to build consent to carry out another, and always existing within the shadow of trauma might inhibit our ability to recognize it at all. 

The visual grammar of A Real Pain is stiffly posed but aggressively candid, capturing its landscapes with a sobering neutrality that is jarringly disproportionate to the weight that each tableau holds. Through this asymmetry between the overwhelming presence of emotion and aesthetics that forcefully withhold it, cinematographer Michal Dymek allows each image the capacity to be intensely painful or immensely pedestrian. What is mourning to one is mundane to another — stones as a symbol of remembrance might become a tripping hazard, and the glistening lights of a concentration camp are eventually folded into the city skyline. 

These complexities of composition once again underline the paradoxes of processing grief. Our anxieties and agonies are mapped onto every part of us, sometimes in extraordinary ways, but mostly in menial ones, and it's hard work to truly process or even feel the weight of our past. But it’s work that has to be done, even if we don’t know what resolving it looks like, even if resolution is a real pain.

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

A Real Pain was released on November 1, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters.