A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg’s neurotic buddy movie is an intelligent take on Holocaust remembrance

It’s well-enough known that the Shoah, perhaps more than any other subject, poses difficult questions for filmmakers: how (and how not) to represent it; how to grapple with its enormity; how to make art commensurate with the defining trauma of 20th-century Europe in a profit-driven medium. It’s a mark of Jesse Eisenberg’s intelligence and sensitivity that his second feature as director, A Real Pain, takes as one of its subjects not the Holocaust itself, or even its legacy, but the inadequacy of our response to it in the present.

I say ‘one of its subjects’, because that’s the other smart move: Eisenberg recognises that for Jewish Americans today, the Holocaust, while undiminishable in magnitude and implication, is also simply another thing to reckon with in the course of a busy life. The film’s writer-director-star, Eisenberg came up with the story after seeing an online ad offering ‘Holocaust tours (with lunch)’, and though this seems a promising launchpad for a satire of late capitalism, A Real Pain takes a warmer, less trenchant tack.

The plot revolves around the relationship between David (Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin). Considering the advert that inspired the movie, it might be a sly self-deprecating joke that the emotionally repressed David sells digital ads for a living; he’s also father to a young boy. Benji, meanwhile, seems to be going nowhere fast: he’s an impish charmer who ricochets between deep feeling and manic wit, given to pawing David with a familial warmth that also seems freighted with desperation and resentment. The two haven’t bonded in years, but have found their way back to each other through their late grandmother Dory, who left them money for a trip to Poland to see the town where she lived before she fled the Nazis in 1939. The cousins meet in a New York airport; they eventually part in the same place.

As a road-trip movie, A Real Pain doesn’t quite satisfy: the locations are shot with clinical neatness, and the sense of place rarely feels indelible (though this is apt, given the characters’ whistle-stop timetable). And as a character study, it doesn’t have especially long legs: we get the measure of its leads in the first half hour. But it plays nicely as a buddy movie, the lack of surprises in characterisation made up for by the vividness of the performances. Eisenberg, playing his usual neurotic, knows his own limited strengths as an actor: on the rare occasion his lips jerk into a smile, it hits hard. But most viewers will be drawn to this film by Culkin, now best known for Succession (2018-23), in which he played Roman Roy, the capricious would-be boy-emperor striving to succeed his dad as head of a right-wing media conglomerate. Somehow, Culkin made you feel deeply for a super-rich hobgoblin given to ripping up million-dollar cheques in front of working-class kids and aligning all too eagerly with fascists.

His role in A Real Pain stretches him less, though he’s heartbreaking all the same: a perceptive, hyper-intelligent slacker, Benji is both knife and wound. But even over a relatively brief 89 minutes, watching him work out his inner dialectic becomes slightly exhausting. What seem to be passionate convictions often dissolve on a whim. (A jape by another great Jewish mischief-maker, Groucho Marx, comes to mind: “ Those are my principles. And if you don’t like ’em… well, I have others.”) Though the exhaustion may be part of the point, the focus on Benji comes at the expense of other lines of inquiry: the backstories of James (Will Sharpe), a northern English philosemite of Asian extraction who leads the ‘Holocaust tour’ the cousins have signed up for, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan Canadian who fled the genocide of the Tutsis and converted to Judaism, are tantalisingly not fleshed out. And we learn little about Dory, who kickstarted the whole narrative.

Still, when the cousins finally arrive at Dory’s old tenement block, rather than revelations we get a very Jewish comic bathos: they try to memorialise her by placing two rocks on her former doorstep and are immediately reprimanded by a neighbour who says it’s a trip hazard. ‘Think you can plug in to the past that easily?’ the film seems to ask. ‘Think again’.

► A Real Pain is in UK cinemas now.