As Benji, Kieran Culkin has no sense of boundaries. On a Jewish heritage tour that he takes with his cousin David to Poland, the country where their grandmother survived the Holocaust, Benji casually insults David, disparaging his job and calling him a lightweight for being unable to stay up all night; he overshares embarrassing moments from David’s life with the other members of the tour; he both trespasses private property and stomps on David’s privacy with glee. He is, in short, aptly described by the title of the movie that he dominates, which is written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who portrays David.
Perhaps you have characters similar to Benji in your life. I have one. And Jesse Eisenberg has several – characters he created in the four plays he wrote that were produced Off-Broadway between 2011 and 2019.
Indeed, “A Real Pain” has so much in common with those plays – not just an obnoxious character, but themes, settings, even the mix of tones – that they struck me as a dry run for this deceptively simple, exquisitely crafted film.
This is not, of course, to imply that theater is secondary to film as an art form, only that “A Real Pain” is a better realization of the storytelling that Eisenberg was working out on stage, and in stages.
There are disparate pieces of “A Real Pain” traceable back to “Asuncion,” the play that marked Eisenberg’s Off-Broadway playwriting debut, at the Cherry Lane Theater. In it, Eisenberg portrayed Edgar, who lives with Vinny (Justin Bartha) in a messy off-campus apartment in Binghamton, New York. Edgar is depicted as clueless and shiftless, Vinny as an incessant pot-smoker, whom Edgar envies to the point of worship for his coolness, but he also resents him for it. In “A Real Pain,” Benji lives in Binghamton, New York, doesn’t have a job, and incessantly smokes marijuana. And, as “A Real Pain” unfolds, we learn that the dynamic between the cousins is similar to the roommates in “Asuncion”: Despite (or perhaps due to) his boundary-pushing, Benji is able to enter a room of strangers and charm them all – a power that David admits to Benji he would give anything to possess; he envies it, and resents it.
Eisenberg’s second play, “The Revisionist,” produced in 2013 at the Cherry Lane, is set in Poland, where Eisenberg portrays a character named David, who is visiting a distant relative, Maria (portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave.) But his trip is a selfish one – he is a self-satisfied young writer who had some success with his first book, and has decided on this trip not in order to get to know his heritage, but simply to free himself from distractions so that he can finish his next book. Instead, he spends most of his time in his room smoking marijuana, rudely rebuffing Maria’s every gesture of hospitality. It is a credit to Eisenberg’s writing that we’re not completely put off by the callowness of this insufferable character; sometimes we’re simply amused by it. But by the end of “The Revisionist,” Maria has opened up about her suffering during the war. Holocaust survivor, and an orphan, she can’t understand David’s indifference to the wealth of family he has in the States, whom she longs to get to know. This contrast between the life-and-death experience of the older generation, and the petty snits of the new one, is implicitly explored in “A Real Pain.” Its very title can be read as an irony and an admonishment, especially during the effective, unembellished scenes of Benji and David’s tour of the Majdanek extermination camp, filmed on location.
Eisenberg again portrayed a clueless jerk, this time named Ben, in his 2015 play, The Spoils, again tempering his character with amusing dialogue. Here is an exchange in which Ben puts down Kalyan (Kunal Nayyar), a business school student who is his roommate and only friend, for wanting to work on Wall Street (which is reminiscent of the ways that Benji criticizes David in “A Real Pain”):
Ben: ….for a Jewish kid from the suburbs, and I’m speaking as a Jewish kid from the suburbs, it’s not interesting and it’s a shitty way to make a living. Listen, it’s like if I was born in Nepal like you, and I wanted to be a Sherpa or a Gurkha or a Parka or whatever, that would be like an easy way out, right?
Kalyan: Gurkhas are considered the preeminent fighting squad in the world.
Ben: And I’m sure they’re great but –
Kalyan: And Sherpas can summit Everest without oxygen.
Ben: Again, a great accomplishment–
Kalyan: Parkas keep you insulated from a cold breeze.
Ben: That’s cute
In his 2019 play “Happy Talk,” Eisenberg again creates an insufferable character – this time for a different performer, Susan Sarandon, who portrays Lorraine, whose clueless self-involvement (again) at first amuses us. But there is such unmitigated cruelty in Lorraine’s betrayal of Ljuba (Marin Ireland), the immigrant she has hired to be a live-in maid for her ill mother, that “Happy Talk” turns sour and off-putting.
My hope at the time was that Eisenberg would keep on writing, but be kinder to the characters he creates — not because it was the decent thing to do, but because it would deepen his work.
This is arguably what he has done in “A Real Pain.” Benji, for all his recklessness, is a more sympathetic character than Eisenberg’s previous jerks, and not just because we learn of Benji’s history of serious psychological suffering. It helps that the director and screenwriter has taken out some of the less admirable qualities of his previous jerky protagonists and given them to David, making him the one who is awkward and antisocial. This allows Benji to be sociable and compassionate – at heart, a generous soul. There are several scenes that show us this generosity, tempering the ones that show his obnoxiousness – indeed, explaining how a person with a lack of boundaries can bring other people together. What Jesse Eisenberg has done in “A Real Pain” is offer a lesson in the benefits of such generosity of spirit, including his own new-found generosity towards his characters.
