Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg collide in this entertaining double act

A REAL PAIN ★★★½

(MA) 90 minutes

Jesse Eisenberg was not a good choice to play Superman villian Lex Luthor, nor has he had much luck since with extending his acting range. Now entering his forties, he’s still most at home playing anxious adolescent types, inwardly focused yet hyper-sensitive to slights.

Eisenberg’s trick, though, is that he can fully inhabit these earnest, prickly personalities while also viewing them from outside, at least enough to be alert to what makes them funny. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to write and direct A Real Pain, in which he and Kieran Culkin star as David and Benji Kaplan, cousins who are more like brothers, though they haven’t seen so much of each other lately.

David’s neuroses are visible literally at a glance, especially from our first glimpse of Eisenberg scurrying through the airport with a cap pulled down over his curly hair, awkwardly holding his passport out in front of him. Benji is his equally vulnerable opposite number, in some ways a variant on the brash lost boy Culkin played in Succession, though with a softer heart and less wealth to shield him.

At first, Benji seems the less functional of the pair, off on his own planet to the point of having only a hazy sense of what other people’s lives might look like (he can’t understand why he isn’t visited more often by David, who’s recently married with a young son). Yet, he’s emotionally open in a way David not so secretly envies – and subsequent events pose the question of who truly has the more viable design for living.

Their double act is entertaining and touching, even if David could use an extra dimension to make him more than just a straitlaced foil (I kept wondering what his dreams were before he resigned himself to supporting his family selling internet ads). But this is only half the movie: the other half concerns the journey they undertake from New York to Poland in honour of their family heritage, in particular the grandmother they’ve just lost.

Is A Real Pain first and foremost a film about the Holocaust? This may be a trick question, pointing to an even trickier one: is it possible to tell a story with concentration camps in the background and do any degree of justice to this history they represent, without having this overwhelm everything else?

There are many reasons such a project could imaginably be worth pursuing (Eisenberg’s family background isn’t far removed from the Kaplans, which doesn’t mean anything here is literally autobiographical). No less evident are the risks of getting the tone wrong – but then again, aren’t all possible ways of dealing with this subject inadequate at best?

That appears to be part of the point of A Real Pain, brought home not just through David and Benji’s contrasting temperaments, but through the other characters who join them on a week-long tour of Holocaust sites in Poland – led by a non-Jewish Oxford graduate wonderfully played by Will Sharpe, who is genuinely thoughtful and good at his job without ceasing to be faintly absurd.

A Real Pain has its limitations: the dialogue can be over-explicit, and the style decorous to a fault (there’s a lot of Chopin piano music on the soundtrack). There are moments when you can imagine how the movie might gain in depth if it spiralled out of control rather than remaining a neat equation, but this never seems likely. Eisenberg is more of a David than a Benji, in other words. Still, he knows it, which isn’t nothing.

A Real Pain is released in cinemas on December 26.

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