A Real Pain
A Real Pain is a 2024 comedy-drama film written, directed and starred by Jesse Eisenberg. An international co-production between Poland and the United States, the film stars Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as mismatched cousins who reunite for a Jewish heritage tour through Poland in honor of their late grandmother, but tensions between them surface amidst the backdrop of their family history. Its supporting cast includes Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes.
Principal photography took place primarily in Poland from May to June 2023. A Real Pain premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, and was released theatrically in the United States on November 1, 2024, and in Poland on November 8 by Searchlight Pictures. The film grossed $24.9 million worldwide.
A Real Pain was critically acclaimed and received several accolades, including two nominations at the 97th Academy Awards and 78th British Academy Film Awards, and four at the 82nd Golden Globe Awards; Culkin won the Oscar, BAFTA, SAG, Golden Globe and Critics' Choice for Best Supporting Actor, while Eisenberg won the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay. It was named as one of the top ten films of 2024 by the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review.
Plot
At John F. Kennedy International Airport, Benji Kaplan waits for his once-close cousin, David, to arrive so they can board their flight. Using the funds left by their late grandmother, the Kaplans plan a Jewish heritage tour through Poland in hopes of seeing the home she grew up in and connecting with their family history. Their contrasting personalities spark several arguments: Benji is a free-spirited and outspoken drifter who criticizes David for losing his former passion and spontaneity, while David is a pragmatic and reserved family man who struggles with Benji's unfiltered outbursts and lack of direction in life.Arriving at Warsaw, David and Benji meet with their tour group members: Mark and Diane, a retired married couple from Shaker Heights, Ohio; Marcia, a recent divorcee from California; and Eloge, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism after moving to Winnipeg. The tour is led by James, a mild-mannered, knowledgeable, gentile guide from Yorkshire. On the first day, the tour visits the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, Grzybów Square, and the Warsaw Uprising Monument. Benji engages the whole group in assisting him in a reenactment of the Warsaw Uprising around the latter sculpture. An embarrassed David stands apart and takes pictures using the members' phones.
The group travels to Lublin by train on the second day. Benji is unsettled by the incongruity of traveling first class on a Holocaust tour through former Nazi German-occupied Poland. David falls asleep and Benji does not wake him, which results in the cousins missing their stop. After finding their way back, James leads the group through the city's cultural sights, such as the Grodzka Gate and the Old Jewish Cemetery. Benji criticizes James's lack of authenticity during their visit to the cemetery and challenges his focus on facts and statistics. Benji continues to misbehave and make uncomfortable comments during a group dinner later that evening. When he leaves the table, David opens up to the group about the complex nature of their relationship, revealing that the two have drifted apart after Benji attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills six months earlier.
The next day, David and Benji visit Majdanek, a Nazi German concentration and extermination camp, during their last day with the group. They see the gas chamber, the crematorium ovens and a huge pile of the victims' shoes. Deeply affected by what they had just witnessed, the group sits in stunned silence as their van returns to Lublin, with Benji, seated next to David, sobbing. Back at the hotel, the group members bid farewell to each other. James tells Benji that he is the first person on one of his tours to provide him with honest feedback, and thanks him for changing his perspective, although Benji does not seem to remember the outburst. The Kaplans smoke marijuana together on a hotel rooftop on their final night in Poland. Benji confronts David about his changed personality and asks why he never visits him. While David initially responds that he is busy with his wife and son, he eventually breaks down and explains that following Benji's suicide attempt, he is unable to bear the thought of a person with Benji's talent, charm and passion for life killing himself.
In the morning, the cousins travel to their grandmother's former home in Krasnystaw. Benji recalls a moment when she slapped him after he arrived late and intoxicated to dinner, which gave him a sense of clarity and humility. He laments that she was the only person who was able to keep him disciplined. David suggests that they place visitation stones on the home as an act of remembrance, but a neighbor asks them to remove the stones because they are a tripping hazard. The pair flies back to New York and exchanges goodbyes. David invites Benji to his home for dinner and offers to give him a ride, but Benji declines the offer, prompting David to slap him. They immediately reconcile and profess that they care deeply about each other. David returns home to his wife and son, leaving a visitation stone on his doorstep, while Benji returns to his seat at the airport, observing travelers with tears in his eyes.
Cast
Production
Casting
In August 2022, it was announced that Jesse Eisenberg would write, direct, and star in A Real Pain opposite Kieran Culkin. Emma Stone, Dave McCary and Ali Herting were set to produce for Fruit Tree.Eisenberg first offered the role of Benji to Eric André, who turned it down after reading the script and thinking "to go to Poland for six weeks and shoot a movie where we're just babbling about the Holocaust seems like a bummer." Eisenberg was unfamiliar with Culkin's work prior to developing A Real Pain, but decided to then reach out to him based on his essence and his sister's recommendation. He did not send Culkin the first ten pages of the script at first because he thought the role should be given to a Jewish actor; Culkin was raised Catholic. Eisenberg initially wanted to play Benji, as he possesses some of his characteristics, but the producers suggested that he should not take on an "unhinged" performance while directing at the same time. He admitted to Vulture that he had "17,000 thoughts" about casting a non-Jewish actor in a role intended for a Jewish character, "and where I come out is gave me an amazing gift by helping to tell this story that is very personal for my family."
Culkin, on the other hand, was hesitant to jump into another "intense" project so soon after wrapping Succession. He attempted to back out of A Real Pain two weeks before filming began, citing his need to be close to his family as the main reason, but he loved Eisenberg's "beautiful" script and When You Finish Saving the World, Eisenberg's previous directorial effort. Stone convinced him to stay on by pointing out that the entire production would essentially fall apart if he left.
Writing
In November 2017, Eisenberg wrote a short story titled "Mongolia" for the Jewish online magazine Tablet. The story focused on two college friends—one of whom is grounded, while the other is impulsive—who travel to East Asia in search of the "experience of a lifetime", only to find themselves in a yurt on an ecotourism center. Both of the main characters were taken from two plays that Eisenberg wrote and starred in, respectively: The Revisionist and The Spoils.Eisenberg liked the Odd Couple dynamic presented in "Mongolia" and wanted to adapt it for the screen, but struggled to finish the script. As he was ready to scrap the project, an advertisement for a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp with complimentary lunch appeared on his computer screen. The image both mortified and delighted Eisenberg, as he felt "it sums up everything I think about being a third-generation survivor, which is: There's no good way to experience this. There's no perfect way to honor and revere the history, because anything you do would be in the context of modern privilege."
Eisenberg comes from a secular Jewish background and has Polish ancestry. For twenty years, he has struggled with answering the question of how he could reconcile his "modern daily challenges" with his Ashkenazi ancestors' historical trauma as Holocaust victims and survivors. When he started writing A Real Pain in 2022, which initially began as a thought experiment, Eisenberg sought to place two modern, mismatched cousins struggling with "different degrees of pain," such as anxiety and depression, against the backdrop of the horrors of World War II. The setting allowed him to explore those themes in a "visually explicit" manner and "implicitly" ask questions in a way that did not feel didactic.
Filming
took place in New York City and various locations across Poland from May to June 2023. Because Eisenberg started writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, he used the street view feature on Google Maps and pictures he took when he traveled to Poland with his wife in 2008 to scout locations and take the tour that the characters were going on. Michał Dymek, the cinematographer, is a native of Warsaw and was raised with historical awareness of the events that occurred in his country. His deep knowledge of his hometown helped Eisenberg film montages that would highlight Poland's beauty:Dymek's main artistic idea was to work with perspective, as the film features characters who see themselves differently. He wanted to combine their observations by using standard lenses with longer optics, which flattens the perspective to "play with the fact that sometimes the same image can be defined differently by choosing a different focal lens."