In this installment of MTC Oscar Series, Grey Mangan Blackwell, Audrey Halversen, and Tyler Talbott offer their thoughts on Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, a dramedy about two cousins who embark on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland in their grandmother’s memory, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin.
Grey Mangan Blackwell: A Real Pain is an impactful, nuanced, and visceral reimagining of the classic road trip film. It is about bearing the weight of generational trauma, grappling with changing family dynamics in adulthood, and enduring in the face of overwhelming odds. Spanning the length of a tour around Poland between once-close American cousins in an attempt to connect with their recently deceased Jewish grandmother, Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) set out to see the homeland she fled during the Holocaust. The film is unflinching and, as promised by the title, real. This is a story that is not just about immigrants and refugees, but also their children (and children’s children)—“the products of a thousand fucking miracles.”
A Real Pain is nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Kieran Culkin as Benji, the affable yet manic counterpart to Jesse Eisenberg’s David, a put-together and obsessive rule follower. While not reaching double-digit nominations, I feel that A Real Pain has been nominated for very achievable categories for the film. Culkin’s performance has brought much of the well-deserved attention to the film, and his ability to dig deep emotionally allows him to perform the role of a man grappling with his own mental health struggles, grief, and loneliness. The film is Eisenberg’s sophomore writer-director project and his first Academy writing nomination. It is clear that the film has a kind of green-ness to it, clearly made by people who are newer to filmmaking, and that is part of what makes it a good watch. It has good performances all around, moments of really excellent writing (especially in monologues), and moments of really intense attention to detail when it matters (particularly in its depiction of Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland). It is not changing the face of cinema forever—but A Real Pain never said it would. What it claims to do, and delivers on, is intense realness. There are moments in this film that feel almost voyeuristic to watch because they feel so believable, pain and joy and trauma and connection that is transmitted so easily to the viewer—and it has been a long time since I’ve seen a film that did that.
A Real Pain did not receive the same marketing/publicity as some of its fellow nominees, but nonetheless is a must-watch for this award season. In a field like this, in a phenomenal year for film in general, it feels an impossible task to predict ahead of time whether A Real Pain will go home with a coveted Oscar, but what we can be certain of is that this film will likely provide a platform for Eisenberg to continue his career pivot into writing and directing (a good thing for all of us) as well as provide more opportunities for Culkin to continue to climb. Do yourself a favor and watch A Real Pain as soon as you can.
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Audrey Halversen: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain follows two mismatched cousins—Benji (Kieran Culkin), the chaotic, unemployed feeler of emotions, and David (Eisenberg), the cautious, anxious digital ad salesman—as they take a Holocaust tour through their Jewish ancestors’ homeland. By the end of the movie, I wanted to scream at strangers on a train. Let me explain.
In the beginning of the film, Benji—with his bundles of emotions and disregard for the norms of when to express them—seems to have it all figured out. Even the emotionally regulated (stunted?) David shows a sort of mischievous giddiness as he goes along with Benji’s free-spirited, rebellious schemes (e.g., barreling through a door marked personnel only to smoke pot on a hotel roof). There is also a great tenderness in the way David reacts to Benji’s open-heartedness (e.g., “Sometimes when I look at you, I see [Grandma]…I don’t know man, you look wise, and…it’s beautiful”; or, if you prefer: “Oh yeah dude, I forgot, you have super nice feet…they’re graceful as fuck”), as if he is touched but equally shocked to hear such emotional honesty.
Yet, roughly 30 minutes into the film’s hour-and-a-half runtime, Eisenberg reminds us there is a brutal side to emotional honesty. On a train traveling through Poland, Benji contrasts his own comfortable experience on the train with the devastating pain felt by forcibly relocated Jewish victims of the Holocaust and breaks down: “We completely cut ourselves off from anyone else’s true pain, like the actual experience of being shoved in a train car, your fucking head bashed in?” he screams. “Why are you doing this?” snaps David, concerned by the public scene his cousin is causing, before Benji replies with: “I’m just saying how I feel!”
Saying how he feels? In the year 2025? On public transportation? Compare that to what I so often experience:
I read the day’s (devastating) headlines, the articles, the op-eds, because I need to be a well-informed citizen and not take advantage of the privilege that could permit me to tune out the surrounding horrors. I read everything, and I learn, and I absorb it, and I feel the pain.
But I do not feel the pain so much that it affects my daily temperament, because that would hinder my productivity, and I have to be productive to make myself marketable, because I need to secure a good job so I can have food and health insurance and increase my chances of owning a home before I’m so old that a 30-year lease means that I will be making mortgage payments from my grave.
And I do not feel the pain just anytime, because what if I feel it during a meeting, or while I am teaching, or when there is work to be done! And God help me if I voice the pain in public, because what would that do to my reputation, my career? So I carve out short intervals of time when I am allowed to feel the pain, and with the rest of my day I block it out, and I focus on the task, and then the next task and the next task, and then I distract myself with the new season of The Bachelor and 200 TikToks, and then I go to bed.
And I don’t know, after watching A Real Pain, I’m thinking maybe I just need to scream on a fucking train.
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Tyler Talbott: Jesse Eisenberg famously does not use social networking sites, but perhaps no other Hollywood career has been more shaped by social media. Nabbing his first and only Oscar nomination playing soulless skinsuit Mark Zuckerberg, Eisenberg blossomed in the 2010s as an embodiment of digitally addled Millennial neurosis. Now behind the camera in the 2020s, as the writer-director of When You Finish Saving the World and this past year’s A Real Pain, Eisenberg is allegorizing the Way We Live Now on X (formerly Twitter).
His debut, fundamentally a Sundance movie (derogatory or not, depending on your perspective), satirizes the online and IRL performances of altruism of a sanctimonious non-profit administrator (Julianne Moore) and her status-obsessed streaming celebrity son (Finn Wolfhard). While the pair start as estranged opposites, over the course of the film they come together in shared embarrassment, as their efforts to resist a dominant national/ethnic/class-based in-group are revealed to themselves as nothing more than smug attempts to forge new in-groups nestled within it. Slacktivists everywhere were put on notice, and not a moment too soon.
A Real Pain welcomely treats the social justice imperative as more than merely a vehicle for self-mortification—though self-mortify it still must. The film’s too-cute title relays its split focus, combining sincere meditations on the piling wreckage of human suffering with mordant taxonomies of the obnoxious ways we (that is, U.S. progressives) respond when it is hurled at our feet. The former is most apparent in how the film thematizes memorialization of the Holocaust, following mostly Anglo-American travelers on their tour of Poland, and further glimpsed in the experience of Jewish-convert Eloge, a refugee of the Rwandan genocide. Mostly eclipsing these historic backdrops is the buddy road trip story of David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), cousins that make up another strained familial dyad. In an early scene establishing their dynamic, Benji’s blundering response to Eloge’s story incites David to rein in his “real pain” of a cousin. However, when the title flashes across a close-up of Culkin’s troubled face in the film’s final shot, Eisenberg has effectively inverted our sense of his satirical target. A Real Pain works best as a reversal of his previous film’s thesis, taking issue less with empty political gestures than with how militantly avoiding them leads to accepting the world as it is. When the group debates modern numbness to the “million reasons to be shocked and appalled,” Benji enthusiastically endorses being shocked and appalled, in contrast to David who recommends bottling pain to avoid burdening others. Almost immediately, Eisenberg the director switches cinematic gears, offering a morally serious montage of tour stops—a strategy repeated during the visit to the Majdanek concentration camp—as if turning the movie’s focus over to Benji’s reasons to be appalled. Throughout, both cousins yearn to be like each other, and David’s sentimental placing of stones on doorsteps in the final act suggests how he is beginning to ape Benji’s emotional openness. But Benji is unable to similarly adopt his cousin’s strategic avoidance of the world’s cruelties in the name of checking privilege. For him, the pain is all too real.
Grey Mangan Blackwell is a PhD student at the University of Michigan who researches the intersection of critical media industry and fan studies in physical mediated spaces, such as fan conventions and festivals. He is frequently found watching long video essays and spending time with his wonderful spouse.
Audrey Halversen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan studying online political expression and alternative forms of news sharing. She loves her partner and two cats and dreams of one day screaming on a train.
Tyler Talbott is an Assistant Professor at Creighton University, teaching and researching across nineteenth century and postcolonial British literature and film. When not frequenting Chicago’s Music Box or Omaha’s Film Streams, he is currently writing about 1980’s countercultural film and video art broadcast on Channel 4.
In the month of February, MTC is featuring writing on this awards season’s contenders. We asked writers, scholars, and cinephiles for their takes on award hopefuls. By placing multiple short reviews in conversation, we hope to open up critical conversation on these films, as each writer highlights what they think is interesting (or excellent, or horrible) about the film.