Film Review: A Real Pain (2024)
Most living Americans remember the days when Woody Allen would crank out at least one seminal film a decade. So it comes as little surprise that the much-bemoaned death of the big-screen comedy over the past years coincided with the Woodman’s forced exile. Allen may well be an irreplaceable talent, but, as actor/director Jesse Eisenberg proves with his latest film, A Real Pain, at least some of his successors have taken the right lessons from America’s raucous Jewish uncle.
For his second film as a director, Eisenberg plays tourist as a nebbish New York City digital ad designer who books a Holocaust tour through Poland with his charismatic slacker of a cousin (Kieran Culkin). They’ve made this trek to visit their recently deceased grandmother’s childhood home and honor her legacy as a survivor. Though rooted in the tropes of buddy comedy and the power of secondhand embarrassment, A Real Pain employs its outlandish conceit to probe the motivations behind the rise of “dark tourism” and its psychological effects on our always-online culture of narcissism.
A lesser film would have succumbed to easy ugly American tropes, but Eisenberg resists turning his ragtag tour group into one-note parodies. The overly amenable couple in the throes of empty nest syndrome, the sad middle-aged divorcee, and the Rwandan millennial convert to Judaism who survived his own genocide convey full inner lives within their precious few scenes on the road to make their own piece with the Majdanek death camp.
In feeling his way through such bleak territory, Eisenberg remains game to serve as the butt of jokes while showing the cracks in a reserve he’s adjusted to perfection–an utter lack of vanity that propels A Real Pain into the top tier of contemporary comedy. As impressive as Culkin is as the bombastic (and most likely bipolar) scene-stealer, on his way to a seemingly inevitable Oscar, both actors know this trip wouldn’t have gone far without Eisenberg’s quite un-Woodylike step out of the limelight.
A Real Pain is now playing in theaters and available for premium digital rental.