David and Benji (short for Benjamin) are cousins, the grandsons of a Polish Jewish holocaust survivor.  This grandmother has died recently, leaving enough money for the two of them to visit their ancestral home.   So they join a small group Jewish heritage tour to Poland.

They are close in age and grew up together almost as brothers, but they’ve gone their separate ways in adulthood.  David has a good job in New York City where he lives happily with his gorgeous wife and ditto little boy.  He starts missing them almost from the moment he gets on the plane.  He’s the staid, stolid one. 

Benji by contrast is a slacker who hasn’t moved far from parental apron strings.  And he has a reckless streak.  When they meet at the airport he horrifies David by announcing he’s bringing along a dope stash.  When David gets anxious about transporting illegal drugs he says ‘what are they going to do – arrest two Jews in Poland over a little grass?’ 

This is the first of many sharp lines in the intelligent, funny/sad script of A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg who also plays David. 

Benji is played by Kieran Culkin and he’s the title character.    

First night in Warsaw, David wants to sleep but Benji insists they go up onto the hotel roof to smoke a joint.  (Turns out he mailed the dope to himself at the hotel and could have spared his cousin’s anxiety by telling him this, but he didn’t.)  This is just the start.  They’re late joining the rest of the group in the morning, and thereafter he’s loud, he’s disruptive, he overshares emotionally, he constantly makes himself the centre of attention, he gets bees in his bonnet about how the tour should be going and argues with the mild-mannered tour guide. 

At one stage he berates the group for travelling in a first-class train carriage when their ancestors were in cattle trucks.  He storms off to the back of the train and David follows him with an exasperated eyeroll towards the others.  When David falls asleep in their second class seat, Benji fails – on a silly whim – to wake him at the right stop and the group has to wait on the platform while the cousins make their way back on a train going in the opposite direction, dodging ticket-inspectors the while. 

And yet….though David worries about his cousin’s behaviour and constantly apologises for it, the rest of the group (with one exception with whom I emphatically agreed) are more tolerant, more forgiving.  They see him as a troubled young man struggling with some undefined emotional burden to do with family, or the legacy of the holocaust, or whatever.  Which he is. 

He’s also, to the irritation and possibly the envy of his more reserved cousin, the first one to break ice, the first one to make friends, the first to endear himself to strangers with his wacky charm and his honest interest in their lives and stories. 

‘You light up a room but then shit all over it,’ says David.  For his part, Benji is forever baiting and taunting his cousin for not acting the goat like they used to as kids, and like he still does. 

These two have grown up together as intimate childhood companions.  There is rivalry, resentment and envy on both sides, but there’s obviously also still residual love between them.  

 We are with them for just a few days, but the script manages, in just a handful of scenes, to convey a wealth of information about their complex relationship, past and present. 

In one such scene the group is at dinner and talk turns to the immigrant experience in America.  David guilelessly passes on one of his grandmother’s sayings:  first generation immigrants are labourers, taxi-drivers and hawkers.  The second generation are doctors, dentists and lawyers. The third generation live in their mom’s basement smoking pot all day.  The company laughs, then David realizes his gaffe: Benji is that third generation.  Benji belches loudly and leaves the table in a huff. 

So authentic is the portrayal of the emotional dynamic between the two that I suspect Jesse Eisenberg has based his story on autobiographical experience.  But I’m not going to google that because the story contained within the film is perfect as it stands.  It never gets maudlin or sentimental, there is no cliched redemption, no pat ending. 

I should say too that the music is perfect, as is its absence in those scenes where the group visits sites of mass murder.  Here, the grim remnants of death camp infrastructure are enough.  And silence.  Even Benji keeps his trap shut.

(At this point I’m reminded of the line: ‘After Auschwitz, there is no poetry’.  I did google that; it was the German philosopher Theodor Arno, in 1949.  He later reconsidered his observation but it continues to resonate.)

All the buzz has been around Kieran Culkin’s performance as the hyperactive pain in the ass Benji, and Culkin has already won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, but to my mind Jesse Eisenberg is the one who deserves most of the plaudits for this movie.  He wrote and directed as well as taking on one of the two lead roles. 

I loved A Real Pain, although I found Culkin’s character supremely annoying.  My companion wasn’t so irritated, but she made me promise to report her opinion, which I share, about the excellence of the writing.