In ‘A Real Pain,’ a road trip whose emotional power sneaks up on you

“A Real Pain,” written by, directed by, and co-starring Jesse Eisenberg, is the kind of movie that creeps up on you. When I first saw it, I found it smart and engaging but also a tad tenuous. A road movie about two New York cousins who embark on a Holocaust history tour in Poland, it feels shaggy and discursive at the outset. But all that looseness is a decoy. A lot of emotional weight is packed into this seriocomic ramble if you know where to look.

David (Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) were close as kids but haven’t seen each other in years. The death of their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, prompts a reunion. Their plan is to fly to Warsaw and eventually split off from the tour to visit their grandmother’s childhood home.

It’s clear from the start that these two are a classic odd couple. David, a husband and father, holds down an unexciting but lucrative tech job. As is true of most of the characters Eisenberg has played in the movies, he’s sharp and tightly wound, and speaks in staccato sentences. Benji, by contrast, is a gregarious oversharer with no real job. His spiritedness is unsettling because it also carries an edge of hysteria.

Both men, in their own way, are visibly distressed. David mostly keeps his discontents locked inside; Benji holds nothing back. He prides himself on being a truth-teller. He loves David but thinks he’s “kind of a lightweight.” He says he misses the kid “who used to cry all the time.” David has a great residual affection for Benji, but what he finds exasperating is that this truth-teller can’t really confront the troubling truths about himself.

As a writer-director, Eisenberg is attuned to register the absurd in even the direst situations. It’s a way of seeing that, in its own modest way, perhaps owes something to the Yiddish sensibility that also informed storytellers like Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer. “A Real Pain,” despite its dark undercurrents, is often very funny.

The tour is headed by James (Will Sharpe), a young, Oxford-educated Brit who, despite not being Jewish, prides himself on his knowledge of Polish Holocaust lore. The group also includes a recently divorced woman, Marcia (Jennifer Grey), and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Canadian resident who escaped the Rwandan genocide and has converted to Judaism. Among many other stops along the way, they visit the Warsaw Ghetto, posing before its monument, and, near the town of Lublin, the Majdanek concentration camp.

In between jaunts, they stay in deluxe hotels and ride in first-class train compartments. The juxtaposition between such comforts and the horrendous history underscoring the trip spins Benji around. He refuses to travel in style and tries, without much success, to make everyone else feel guilty. His carryings-on are not misplaced exactly, but there’s an air of one-upmanship at work, too. He wants everybody to know that he feels more than they do. David finds himself apologizing to the group for Benji’s outbursts, but we can see that, on some level, he wishes he could be as unfettered.

What’s distinctive about “A Real Pain,” which I was slow to grasp, is that none of these scenes is intended to be cathartic, including the moment when the cousins finally encounter their grandmother’s house. This film is saying that you can’t will catharsis. It happens when it happens. Or it doesn’t. This seems to me a more honest view of experience than what we are accustomed to seeing in the movies. 

Eisenberg, whose family fled Poland in 1938, drew on his personal experiences for this film. As an actor, he does well by David, though the performance is not much of a stretch for him. Culkin is rightly the film’s star. He makes Benji’s obnoxiousness both deplorable and deeply touching. Benji revels in his own suffering and, for companionship if nothing else, wants others to suffer alongside him. He’s a wayfarer who embarks on this trip because, without fully realizing it, he is yearning for a foundation. He may be a real pain, but he’s also in real pain. The movie doesn’t diminish his woe.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “A Real Pain” is rated R for language throughout and some drug use.