'A Real Pain’ Is a Beautiful Exploration of Life’s Dichotomies

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin each drive home powerful performances in this understated new release

Searchlight Pictures

A Real Pain presents a story about two cousins and estranged friends as they reunite to see the city in which their Holocaust survivor grandmother grew up. Coupled with their trip is a guided tour of Poland’s traumatic past. Having gone to Israel on a similar tour, it was remarkable to me just how relatable much of the film’s plot was.

My limited time in the country was on “Birthright,” an Israeli-funded tour through which people with Jewish heritage get an almost-all-expenses-paid trip to their “homeland.” During those couple of weeks, the typically-American tourists are ushered around the country and shown enough of its glamorous side that some even decide to move there afterward. But freckled in with all of the fun and sight-seeing and appreciation of Israel’s storied past were reminders of the horrible atrocities that once occurred there.

I’d never seen another show or movie so effectively explore the irony that these tour group scenarios can pose. On one hand, people hope to find community in these kinds of experiences. They hope to have fun and sneak in a healthy smattering of tourist activities while they’re at it. They’re not there to wallow in the sorrows of the past.

Yet at the same time, there’s no retelling of this history that’s complete without a bit of wallowing. And while much of the tour group is enthralled with the sights of the country and reveling in their first class train tickets, Culkin’s Benji is overcome with the bitter realities that underscored their trip. That people once died horrible deaths in these now-thriving cities and towns.

There’s a masochistic sort of therapy that people can derive from visiting the sites of such awful horrors. For many who endured the brutalities of that genocide, they would have sooner seen each concentration camp demolished and the earth on which they stood razed. But there’s also a power in being able to walk through history’s darkest corridors — in learning about the chapters that should never be repeated.