David and Benji were as close as brothers in their younger days. They’re actually cousins born three days apart, but as kids, they were always in each other’s hip pockets.
These days, however, they’ve drifted apart.
David has become a neurotically inhibited, buttoned-up family man and digital ad salesman. And Benji has become, well, adrift, the kind of weed-puffing dude who’s still living in his parent’s basement well beyond his sell-by date.
They both stayed connected to their tough-as-nails grandmother, however. She was a Holocaust survivor who was born in Poland and made her way to the U.S. after the war. So, when she passed six months ago, it was a real blow for both guys.
In fact, it was huge for Benji. He and Grandma Dory had a special connection. And her death drove him to … dark places. One final connecting effort grandma made, though, was to leave her “boys” a bit of cash and a request to go back to Poland. Maybe they could reconnect with their family past, see her childhood home, spend a little time together.
So, David set it all up. He and Benji will participate in a Jewish historical tour in Grandma Dory’s honor. And perhaps it will be a reunion and reconciliation tour as well: pull Benji out of his ongoing doldrums.
The fact is, they both need this trip. Maybe it will give them both something solid to focus on. Maybe they’ll connect with their shunted aside Jewish heritage. And maybe they’ll find some new purpose, new focus.
Then again, maybe the whole thing will just be a real pain.
Between manic emotional swings, Benji takes time to connect with other members of the Jewish Holocaust tour. He comforts a newly divorced woman, for example, and he talks earnestly to an African man about his conversion to Judaism.
Most of the people on the small tour are drawn to Benji despite his caustic emotional swings. In fact, his cousin David talks about the good person Benji is at his core. David even says he longs to be like Benji … except for his nasty mood swings. “You light up a room and then s— on everything inside it,” David tells his cousin.
The cousins also discuss their grandmother’s declaration that she was grateful for the horrible trials she lived through, because they shaped her into the person she was and formed the values she held dear.
David and Benji often clash in A Real Pain. But eventually they embrace and share their mutual love for one another. And it should also be noted that David is a loving husband and dad.
A South African man, Eloge, who survived Apartheid ethnic cleansing and devastation, talks about meeting a group of Jews and being drawn to their compassion and faith. He then converted to Judaism. “When I learned about the Jewish story, I felt peace for the first time,” Eloge recounts.
David and Benji repeatedly tell other tour members about how their grandmother survived the German concentration camps because of “a thousand miracles.” But they never directly mention if she was a person of faith. Elsewhere, David makes it clear that he does not follow Jewish tradition or believe in God. “There but by the grace of no god, go I,” he jokes.
There are, however, passing references to Jews in the past who were religiously faithful. And we see some people put stones on the gravestone of a Jewish man as a spiritual token of remembrance.
It’s mention that Marcia, a divorced woman in the Holocaust tour group, was betrayed and abandoned by her unfaithful husband.
David and Benji talk about Benji’s connection with Grandma Dory. And Benji tells a story of Dory slapping him as a young man in public for his bad behavior. But Benji was very grateful for the physical rebuke in front of everyone because, in his eyes, her harsh discipline demonstrated her love for him. Later, David slaps Benji to communicate the same love.
The Holocaust tour visits a Polish concentration camp. We hear about the scores of Jewish victims murdered there. And we view the “showers” stained by poison gasses and see the bins filled with thousands of victims’ collected shoes.
A Real Pain is profanity-packed with more than 85 f-words and some 40 s-words. There are also a several uses each of “a–hole” and “h—.”
God and Jesus’ names are abused about 10 times total here (Jesus and an f-word being blended once and God being paired with “d–n” one time as well).
David takes a prescription drug to help his OCD.
Benji mails a brick of weed to his hotel in Poland. And we see the guys puffing a joint on a couple occasions.
The tour members all drink wine and beer at dinner together (as do other restaurant patrons). Benji gets visibly drunk. And one late night, Benji drains several mini bottles of booze after getting high. Elsewhere, a woman smokes a cigarette.
We hear about someone attempting suicide with an intentional overdose of sleeping pills.
After missing their train stop, David and Benji board another train and purposely avoid paying the fare.
If you only view A Real Pain’s trailer for moviegoing guidance, you might get the impression that Jesse Eisenberg’s latest writing and directing project is a kitschy dramedy. In that quick cut form, it feels like something of a comedic homage to Woody Allen, with Kieran Culkin in manic mode and Eisenberg settling into his patented uptight-and-nervous character shtick.
But this pic is more and, well, so much less than its trailer suggests.
There are some chuckling bits in the mix, to be sure. but nowhere near as many of those moments as promised. Instead, A Real Pain is an overly talky road-trip examination of ancestral trauma, personal brokenness, modern malaise and the human need for an anchoring connection.
That true anchoring point could have been one of faith, since there are lengthy discussions about historical Jewish suffering in the dialogue. And if Eisenberg had gone there, it probably would have made this a much more poignant film. But instead, he delivers an unfocused, rambling introspection that falls short.
There are positive affirmations of family mixed with exceedingly foul-mouthed rants here, brief bits of human empathy mingled with palpable melancholy. But the fact is, Culkin’s manic-depressive Benji character sucks up most of our attention. And this film as a whole is as intensely foul and emotionally bipolar as he is.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
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