The Tragic Charm Of A Real Pain

A Real Pain: The Art, & Heart, Of Suffering

Jesse Eisenberg’s film, featuring a great Kieran Culkin performance, lives in the nuances of depression, Rahul Desai writes.

JESSE EISENBERG's A Real Pain, starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins, is exactly the kind of film you imagine if Eisenberg and Culkin played cousins. It’s funny, awkward, edgy, poignant, light, chatty, alert, minor-key and Sundancey (an adjective for the brand of tragicomic American quirk that the snowy festival loves to showcase). There are echoes of the uptight mom and no-filter teen from the actor’s directorial debut, When You Finish Saving The World, in the uptight David (Eisenberg) and the free-spirited-but-troubled Benji (Culkin). Family man David and drifter Benji head to Poland to process their Jewish heritage through a guided Holocaust tour and, more importantly, visit their late camp-survivor grandmother’s childhood home. As in most movies, it’s the interiority of the oddball journey that matters.

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Over the course of the tour, it emerges that the two cousins — once inseparable — haven’t spoken much after their grandma's recent death. But one is more affected than the other. A guilt-stricken David has arranged this pilgrimage to lift a grieving Benji out of his funk. This is his way of reconnecting with someone he loves, hates, envies, and resents. But all of David’s contradictory feelings are solidified during the trip: Benji’s unfiltered behaviour — going from crude to a hoot, from joyous to frustrated in seconds — becomes a source of conflict and fascination in this group of cultural tourists. Benji just has so many feelings. The feelings, in turn, have an identity crisis; they have nowhere to go. So they sneak out during a dinner, or during an introductory meeting in the hotel lobby, or explore on a train, at a cemetery, or after a concentration camp visit.

Like most “sorted” humans, David cannot understand how someone as charming and cool as Benji could at once be so volatile, self-harming and unpredictable. David’s empathy is a bit selfish because it stems from his exasperation with a man allegedly ‘wasting’ the gifts he wishes he had. He’s the well-meaning equivalent of an aristocrat who’s annoyed with a peasant for not appreciating their anonymity and freedom. They have a few honest conversations and terrace-bonding microsessions, but anyone who’s lived enough might recognise the insurmountable chasm between them. Benji is bitter with those like David for moving (on) too soon or progressing too far, while he’s struggling with experiences that are supposed to be normal.

There’s a reason the film opens and closes at New York’s JFK airport. It’s where the transitory nature of the space consumes the stillness of a lost passenger. Benji’s just sitting there, surrounded by purpose and motion, immersed in the illusion of mobility like a platform that’s gotten used to being left behind. Everyone’s going places and coming from places, but a guy like Benji simply waits. In his head, maybe if he waits long enough, he will look like he’s moving.

Benji is a real pain in social settings, but very few — not least David, a loving husband and father — understand that Benji’s pain is bracingly real. The power of Culkin’s performance is rooted in how he halts, and humanises, the famously restless and silver-tongued actor we’re used to seeing on screens. His smart-ass Succession persona is so linked to who Culkin comes across as in acceptance speeches and interviews that Benji almost feels like a startling confession: the quick-wittedness is a front for something deeper and less visible. His humour is a defence mechanism. At some visceral level, it’s like watching Culkin struggling to honour our perception of him; Benji’s fits of sensitivity and heartache shine through the clouds of carefully constructed charisma. In his hands, depression is nothing but the grief of being yourself. The loss of his grandma, his favourite person, catalyses his crisis of hope into something more tangible. On a regular day, Benji can’t fathom the fact that life goes on; now he has a reason to feel that way.

I like that A Real Pain refuses to offer a feel-good resolution. It is full of incomplete goodbyes; characters leave more than they arrive. At its core, there’s something eerily sad about watching Benji trying to swim, while his cousins and friends and contemporaries worry from the shore. Early in the film, in the hotel lobby, Benji acknowledges the genuine reaction of their British guide (Will Sharpe) when he speaks of his grandma. The emotional anatomy of his face and eyes change in a split second when he says “Thank you for saying that, James”. Suddenly, his beard and wrinkles come to the fore. It reminded me of Pete Davidson in The King Of Staten Island and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook at once. Benji sees kindred souls in a new divorcee — mourning the sudden death of her marriage — and a Rwandan genocide survivor who has adopted Judaism. He instantly senses that they might get him, which is why he’s so disillusioned when none of them respond to the irony of having a first-class luxury tour of a history of suffering. It’s not that he expects better; he wants his misery to have some company. He wonders why he’s alone in his desperation for a more compassionate and less transactional world.

Eisenberg is deceptively good, too. Only an oblivious but kind chap like David could get away with comparing Benji’s pain to that of others in the group, making the cardinal sin of implying that Benji is perhaps “weaker” than the rest for creating sadness out of very little. It’s a mistake most adults make while trying to interpret a mental health condition. They assume that the void always has a trigger and a backstory; that it can’t happen without deep-set trauma. Benji’s dotted existence reveals the pressure of having to live in a society that encourages such black-or-white perspectives.

The sight of Benji pinballing between highs and lows, memories and dark holes, made me feel a little seen. Benji’s reluctance to cope — combined with his ability to speak his mind without caring for consequences — is both brave and difficult. I’ve written a lot about the vacuum of losing my best friend, but seeing Benji unravel in real time legitimises the social stigma of being naked and vulnerable, dysfunctional and broken. While losing loved ones is considered a ‘common’ occurrence, Culkin’s turn restores the dignity and individualism of grieving. He longs for more than just a person; he longs for a version of himself that his grandma, and even David, used to bring out. He is frank about the fact that he has nothing to return to; David has a family waiting, everyone has a base, but Benji may as well stay at the airport. He may as well take the next flight out or pass out in his mother’s basement again. His escape is actually his reckoning.

I’ve known friends like Benji, and only now do I see why they travel so much to people and places. It’s a desire to belong somewhere because they’ve stopped belonging to themselves. But it’s also true that people who get submerged in this grief are the ones intellectually and emotionally equipped enough to do so. They feel strongly and vastly for a world beyond their control — poverty, fascism, genocides, Gaza, Ukraine, wars and the oppressed everywhere — because they’re the only ones with the courage to feel. They’re the ones willing to put themselves on the line because perhaps nobody does the same for them. M Night Shyamalan formalised this condition and made an entire superhero trilogy based on the tagline “the broken are the more evolved”. A Real Pain might just be an unofficial fourth instalment. Not all heroes wear capes, but they do wear bandages.

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