A Real Pain: Lenses of Grief
As a frequent movie-watcher, I have always been accustomed to watching across genres, but there has always been one kind that I have gravitated towards: grief. Grief is such a complex and subjective experience because no one person’s grief will replicate another’s. Films that depict grief are so vastly different from one another in this same manner and much of the time they’re very hard to rate. Director, writer, and actor Jesse Eisenberg brings grief to light in his new film A Real Pain (2024). Starring Kieran Culkin as Benji Kaplan and Jesse Eisenberg as David Kaplan, A Real Pain depicts the journey of two cousins throughout a guided, group Holocaust tour through Poland in efforts to discover and remember the place their deceased Grandma Dory hailed from. In the story, characters with their own burdens of personal and historical grief intertwine together to make the weight bearable.
David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) meet their tour group for the first time in A Real Pain (2024).
From the beginning, we sense that something is off with Benji and David’s relationship given that Benji is, on the surface, the free-spirited, cool type whereas David is, also on the surface, the overly cautious, OCD type. Polar differences between the cousins are present, but the audience is given the mission to find out what lies deeper and unaddressed between the two of them. Let’s compare and contrast:
A venn diagram of Dave and Benji’s personalities portrayed in A Real Pain (2024).
Throughout the film, I was reminded of the passing of my own grandfather and how a death like that can alter your body emotionally, biologically, and chemically. This can manifest anywhere between outbursts so intense you can barely remember them to being so taciturn your thoughts only collect in the dam that is your mind. Much of why I put off writing this post includes the fact that I struggle to remember who I was before intense grief. You sit in grief’s pool for so long, you become one with it. This is what Benji and Dave emulate. Sitting with something for so long you become your own manifestation of the concept.
The pair’s lack of communication during a grieving period only gave rise to tension. As soon as the tension rose and broke the surface is where we see Benji and Dave’s true love for one another and their grandmother. While Benji was seemingly more close to Grandma Dory and made more efforts to spend time with her, it doesn’t mute the fact that Dave also has built-up grief. After the death, Dave watched Benji go through a suicide attempt via overdosing. This, too, is a part of Dave’s grieving process. The line, “but you light up a room and then you shit on everything inside of it” is delivered by Eisenberg with perfection in reference to Benji’s constant will to bring positivity to everyone around him, in this case it is the tour group, and then re-enter that same environment with the most heavy, saddening scene resulting from his own grief that drains the place of all the light. Even more so frightening is that we see Benji not being able to recall these emotional flare-ups. This causes everyone to walk on a thin, fraying tightrope around him.
“…but you light up a room and then you shit on everything inside of it”
— Jesse Eisenberg as David Kaplan in A Real Pain (2024)
Alongside the theme of grief from someone’s death, I enjoyed the portrayal of each character learning more about Jewish history and heritage shaping the life they lead now. The immigrant descendent experience is one that I don’t hear much of in everyday life, but I wish was talked about more. As an immigrant descendent, we hold so much gratitude towards those who sacrificed so much for us to lead comfortable lives, yet we still harbor an ancestral grief and guilt for being able to lead comfortable lives because those before us couldn’t do so. This all goes back to how grief is multigenerational and multidimensional.
We learn that Grandma Dory made her escape during the Holocaust from concentration camps to New York City. Eisenberg explores this theme deeper by filming in Poland’s Majdanek concentration camp. Majdanek is such a monumental piece of Holocaust history that the Majdanek State Museum has turned away many a film crew due to its highly sensitive background. After reading the script of A Real Pain, the museum allowed Eisenberg to film. All of the shots in Majdanek were filled with heavy air of the souls belonging to the wrongly persecuted. The Polish film crew’s ability to depict this through film in silence and remembrance was remarkable. The Majdanek State Museum aims to preserve the painful history as a memory of what Jewish people have endured, and Eisenberg executed on that mission to give historical recognition to such a place.
With faint notes of Frédéric Chopin throughout the film’s soundtrack, A Real Pain helps you learn the importance of looking at your reflection before and after a pivotal loss. How personalities, relationships, and outlooks can change. Whether or not it is irreversible or not remains to you. Healing yourself remains to you and only you. Wonderful acting, wonderful score, wonderful overall. Applause for you, Jesse Eisenberg, for tying history and emotion together into this gift of a film. I can only hope to see more of Eisenberg’s riveting screenplay on the big stage. And applause for Kieran Culkin for being able to nail this emotional-timebomb of a character. As we’ve witnessed in HBO’s Succession, Culkin is no newcomer to this type of role. What sets him apart is how much life he breathes into a character he plays to the point where we can still hold onto him even after the series ends. I have great hope for A Real Pain’s wins at the 97th Academy Awards for the categories Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor.
