American Jesse Eisenberg’s film A REAL PAIN, which he wrote, directed and plays a leading role in, premiered at this year’s Sundance Film festival and has just opened in Sydney.
The film’s main characters are two cousins with very different personalities, David (Jessie Eisenberg), is mature and responsible. He holds down a high pressure job and has a wife and a young, super active son. Benji (Kieran Culkin) is a dreamer, a free spirit, unencumbered. He is chilled, at times outrageous and likes nothing more than to smoke marijana.
The two cousins meet up at JFK airport, and travel to Warsaw, where they meet up with a small tour group who are doing an extensive Holocaust remembrance tour where they visit some major sites in Poland, where they end up visiting the Majdanek concentration camp in the town of Lublin, one of the Nazi’s worst concentration camp, hauntingly preserved in its original state, and breaking off from the group in the days to visit the address of their much loved grandmother who has only recently passed away.
Eisenberg’s film, though built around a fictionalised narrative, was inspired by a large autobiographical component as he is has Polish Jewish ancestry, and at one time travelled to Poland to visit the home of a much loved great aunt.
A REAL PAIN works on two main levels; seeing how David, Benji and the group deal with coming face to face with the horrific infrastructure of a death camp, situated so close to a main town, and there is the intimate observing of the fraught relationship between the two cousins.
David is only too aware that he is living a very conservative life, far removed from the more adventurous life that he had envisaged for himself in earlier days. Benji throws it right at him, inferring that he has copped out.
David admires Benji’s anarchic, madcap nature, exemplified in a scene that Benji stage where he sets up a photograph of everyone in the group pretending to play active parts in a war as they stand in front of a landmark war sculpture/statue.
He, however, doesn’t like the self destructive aspect to Benji’s personality. David gives it back to Benji “You light up every room you walk in to, and then you shit on everyone in it”.
Verdict. A compelling film. A film of many reflections, the main one being, how painful and heartbreaking some relationships can be.
