A Real Pain (#620)


When I got to my multiplex theater on Saturday around noon, there was an unusually large amount of traffic. But because of the film I planned to see, my theater would be relatively empty and it was. The throngs were seeing Wicked and Gladiator, which I will see on less crowded days. I was rewarded by a nicely done movie which was not the comedy/drama promised. A REAL PAIN was a dark, very serious and depressing movie that did not make me laugh once. Kieran Culkin as Benji and Jesse Eisenberg as Daniel were outstanding as two cousins who are taking a tour of Poland to see where the recently deceased grandmother they loved lived, grew up and survived incarceration in a concentration camp during World War II.  Their trip was funded by money left to them by the grandmother.  They are two very different young men who were once very close.  David is married, with a young son, working and living in New York City; Benji is unemployed and living in the basement of his mother's house in Binghamton, NY. Their relationship during the trip ranges from warmth to anger to tears and shouting as they tour with a very small group of Jewish people which included an unrecognizable Jennifer Grey, led by a British tour guide, which eventually ends in the concentration camp where their grandmother was held.  They leave the tour then to find her home in the suburbs. The ending left me hanging but I could say that about almost every movie I see these days.  Critics (96%) and audiences (79%) gave A Real Pain a well-deserved thumbs up.  


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