Routes: "A Real Pain"

Whatever else A Real Pain wins as we go deeper into the 2024-25 awards season, it surely merits a special prize for Most Economical Screenplay. Running to 90 minutes, with barely a scrap of fat to behold, and setting out two sharply defined and contrasted lead characters as it goes, this script - penned by director-star Jesse Eisenberg - offers a brisk rebuke to all those recent movies that have taken two hours and forty minutes to tell half a story at best. You don't need to make a fuss about building worlds when you send your characters out into the real world; the bonus is that you may also find half your backstory is right there in front of you. Such is the case with this US-Polish co-production about two American cousins setting out to Warsaw on a heritage tour with the intention of reconnecting with their Jewish roots. Eisenberg's David is the nervy, uptight New York city boy, very much the kind of frowning introvert you'd now expect to be played by Jesse Eisenberg. Kieran Culkin's Benjamin, on the other hand, is a loping provincial goofball who burns through all his energies by day and then sleeps like a baby at night; his first act, upon arrival at the pair's hotel in Warsaw, is to take delivery of the package of weed he's mailed himself in advance so as to clear customs. David, naturally, is left incredulous by the audacity, but these boys are clearly two branches of the same Semitic tree: Benjamin the clown, the Woody Allen of Take the Money and Run and Bananas, David the born worrier and over-thinker, resembling more often than not the Allen of Interiors and Shadows and Fog.

The biggest accomplishment of Eisenberg's small but appreciable film is how these roots get properly tangled; the simplicity of design gets snarled up with something more complicated. A Real Pain has been trailed as a blithe odd-couple comedy, which it still sort of is, except that en route - assisted by a Culkin masterclass - Benjamin is revealed as a not wholly comic creation, possessed of a hypersensitivity that means he takes everything to heart, and a deep wellspring of anger and hurt he can't suppress or medicate away as the pill-popping David can. Not to put too fine a point on it: the Holocaust in him keeps coming up. It is, to say the least, a tricky film for the moment we're in; were you to have any residual sympathy left for anyone not currently drifting around the Middle East, your heart would go out to the PRs trying to sell A Real Pain, and the actors having to promote and talk about it. Heading to the concentration camps, played by actual concentration camps, the film does, however, serve as its own oblique comment on the situation we're all facing. One of the themes Eisenberg is wrestling usefully with here is how we remember and what we do with the memory - and furthermore what kind of behaviour, what eruptions of grief and fury, the memory justifies. Not all of it comes off: a couple of scenes - one on a train, another on a hotel roof - have the look of acting showcases (or Oscar clips) rather than the real life this camera more generally seeks out. (Even a ninety-minute screenplay might benefit from a trim here and there.) Yet Eisenberg the director finds ways of softening any heaviness, offering light sprinklings of Chopin, the cousins' sweet bickering, and a breezy summer air that in its own way recalls the dogged investigations of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. We have been ill-served by history, A Real Pain concludes, and we owe it to ourselves and everyone around us to figure out some way to get past those grievances. A more serious undertaking than it first appears, it's a film that goes to some commendably deep places: the scholar in Eisenberg keeps coming up.

A Real Pain opens in cinemas nationwide from Wednesday.