Pop Culture Happy Hour - A Real Pain

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

The moving dramedy A Real Pain stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as two very different cousins attempting to reconnect by going on a heritage tour of Poland. As they make their way across the country, they mourn their late grandmother, confront the fractures in their relationship, and reckon with the grief left in the wake of the Holocaust. A Real Pain was written and directed by Eisenberg.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

The moving dromedy A Real Pain stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as two very different cousins attempting to reconnect by going on a heritage tour of Poland. As they make their way across the country, they mourn their late grandmother, confront the fractures in their relationship, and reckon with the grief left in the wake of the Holocaust. But it's funny, we swear. I'm Glenn Weldon. And I'm Aisha Harris, and today we're talking about a real pain on pop culture happy hour from NPR. Joining us today is Andrew Laypen. He's a senior reporter for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the host of the podcast Radioactive, The Father Coughlin Story. Welcome back, Andrew. Hello. It is a real pleasure, not a real pain to be here. Aha. Thank you. It is great to have you here. A real pleasure for sure. So in a real pain, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play cousins David and Benji, who used to be close but have since grown apart. They decide to travel to Poland together for a Holocaust remembrance tour. and to visit the childhood home of their late grandmother.

They're in modern-day, odd couple. Uptight, straight-laced David has a wife, a kid, and a brownstone, Benji's Mercurial, and Adrift, the kind of guy who can swing between personable and antagonistic in seconds, the trip brings up unresolved tensions. The third generation lives in their mother's basement in Spook's pot all day. She said that? I think she was like just speaking generally about the immigrant experience.

I lived in my mom's basement. She was just talking about immigrants. Okay. That's all. Yeah. Jesse Eisenberg being so Jesse Eisenberg in this movie. If you can't tell from that clip. A Real Bain was written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and it's in theaters now.

So, Glenn, I know we've kind of chatted about this already. I have a sense of how you feel, but tell us how do you feel about a real pain? Oh, man, this is such a smart movie about human behavior, about interpersonal conflict. And it doesn't need to be, right? Because you can tell just because these two main characters are types that in maybe the first draft of this film, there's a film behind this where you kind of push both of these characters a little bit further to either end of this emotional spectrum and they become cartoons. Yeah. Right?

If you increase the volume on even a little bit, because they are so different, it becomes a classic comedy set up straight guy and goofy guy. It is so much smarter about that, about personalities. And as someone who identifies with the Davids, the Jesse Eisenberg characters of the world, I know exactly that feeling of someone. someone you know and love being effortlessly charming and disarming and lighting up that damn room and you feel that envy, you feel that resentment. But at the same time, they are so wounded that they need to, like this character does, like Benji does, they need to lay claim to being the most sensitive, the most soulful, the most enlightened. You know, it's that narcissistic self-righteousness that kicks in. I mean, in that moment in the tour group early on when they're first meeting each other, Benji is so locked in a way that strikes me as performative, that strikes David as performative, and that's the tension. But it wasn't just that.

There are more layers to this film than that. And we could get into that. But the fact that it is set against the backdrop of the Holocaust and yet, to my mind, never seems to be content to kind of lazily draft on the emotional heft, the emotional momentum of that. It is what it's interested in doing is carving out its own space in the shadow of this gaping psychic wound on their family, on their people, on the world to do this very small human connection. And at the end of the day, that's all of us anywhere trying to do. So, man, it's such a chewy, satisfying movie.

I dug it. Yes, yes. And as hefty as the topic of the Holocaust is and as dramatic as this, you know, relationship between the two of them is, it's still quite funny many times. And I think that helps balance it out. Like you said, Glenn, keep it from feeling too overwhelming and too heavy. Andrew, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on this. How do you feel?

Yeah, I quite like this. And I have to say, I really appreciate most of all what Jesse Eisenberg is doing here. You heard in that great clip where he references the third generation. This is a real thing. He's capturing something that many millennial diaspora Jews go through at some point in their lives, including a lot of people I know, this urge to try to reconnect with the Holocaust, with the most painful parts of our shared history, because you feel like you owe some kind of debt to the the previous generations for having survived so much so that you can live in comfort. There's this overwhelming sense of guilt. And when you go on these Holocaust tours, which are very odd things, and we can talk about them later, you know, you're physically very close to the sight of so much suffering. But temporally, you're very far away. And you don't really know how to reckon with that. And so he's giving us, not a grand statement, but he's giving us these two distinct

character types, each of whom reacts to the situation in very different ways. and the movie is asking, what is the logical response to trying to make sense of all this pain? Is it David's way or is it Benji's way? And either way opens up a lot of psychological challenges and difficulties. And so it's very smart the way it sort of filters these big questions through these two characters who are quite funny and fun to watch. So in that sense, it works very well, even though I do have some questions about the overall kind of structure of the movie that we can maybe get into. later. Yeah, I definitely want to dig into that. I mean, for me, I was just so taken aback by how tight this script is and how well all the parts move together. And yes, it's Jesse Eisenberg

and Kieran Culkin, who I think had just such great chemistry, very real, believable chemistry. Those relationships with cousins are very different than the ones you have with your siblings in many cases. And it really gets at how you can both be very very. close, but also feel very far from them because you don't necessarily grow up in the same household. There's all these other things, but you share these same experiences and same relatives and family members. But what I also really appreciated about this movie is how it just so accurately gets at the whole idea of a tour, regardless of whether you are going to something as heavy as a Holocaust tour or some other tour of a place where devastating things happened.

Or if you're just going on like a tour of, I don't know, the rainforest or something. Like every tour has a weird dynamic. There's one or two people who stand out as the ones who like take over all the energy and are the ones who are like the Benji character are making comments. They're making quips. He may or may not feel a type of way of me saying this, but I am married to someone who tends to be the person who likes to make quips and jokes. He's not going to go up to the tour guide and tell them you're doing this wrong.

But he will, you know, he'll make side comments. And so I love the way we have all these moving parts. You have Jennifer Gray, who's playing a woman named Marcia. She's there on the tour by herself, but she's there to also reconnect with her family members who were part of the Holocaust or survived the Holocaust. And the way that Benji interacts with her, he's just like, I see a deep sadness in her eyes. And he wants to like, he uses his way of, like, his charming but also exhausting way of being a person to sort of endear himself to her. Just seeing all of these people interact and how there's also other characters in this tour group who are like, don't find him as charming. It felt very true to the tour experience.

And I really love that. Yeah, me too. And I think what you're picking up with when you talk about the tightness is that Jesse Eisenberg is a playwright at heart. And this script has such economy, such efficiency. We know very little about each person. But what we know is enough. Every detail we get is specific and it resonates. Can I just say how remarkable it is, given how little information we get, how clearly the picture of this grandma emerges.

I can see her. I can feel her because he's doing such a classic playwright thing where he's giving us two different people looking at the same thing, coming away with two different takeaways. And we get such specific details from the jump. Like in the first three minutes of this film, David Eisenberg's character leaves 11 voice messages. Thank you. I now know something about this character. Culkin, Benji, has to watch the safety demonstration on the airplane because they're just doing their jobs.

Thank you. And similarly, I was taken by the fact that we don't get much about all the people on the tour. We just get enough. I don't need their backstories. All I need for them to do is to be what Ian Forrester calls like flat characters versus round characters. They exist to bounce off our main characters and show different sides of them as they interact with different of these people on the tour. So I've read some critiques where they're talking about how these people seem flat. That didn't bother me at all.

They're exactly who they need to be because this is about these two dudes. On that note, what did you think of Karen Culkin? Because to me, he starts off playing a very specific character type who I feel like we see a lot of. He's sort of this bullheaded free spirit who kind of moves a lot of things along because the timid protagonist can't bring himself to do it. And so I was like, oh, are we sort of going in this one direction where he's like bringing the weed into the hotel room and all this stuff? But then it felt at one point like he is able to kind of subvert that characterization and really interrogate, how did this person wind up this way? And what is his effect on other people? And it didn't feel so clear cut to me by the end.

And I could think to myself, oh, I understand why everybody is raving about Kieran Kulkin's performance. Like by the second half of the movie, it worked on me in a way where at first I was maybe I had my guard up a little bit more. Yeah, definitely. I felt that same thing. I mean, I came out of this theater telling my husband, oh, man, the Kieran Kalkin character was so annoying. And he came out of going, I couldn't stand in the Jesse Eisenberg character. God, what a whiner. And I was like, okay, we've just unpacked our relationship.

I think there was a subtle clue to their relationship that didn't really hit me until the next day. Culkin's character, Benji says, if you remember, he loves to hang around airports because you meet such weird people. But then when we actually see him in an airport by himself, he isn't this charismatic charmer that he is around David. He's just sitting there by himself. He's not engaging with anyone. It's as if the David character is a kind of catalyst for him. Like some part of him, it struck me, is performing for David. He needs to show someone up.

He needs to lord over someone. And that is such a small but perfect detail that, again, just resonated with the psychological truth of this movie. Both performative and manipulative, right? Because so much of what he's at his happiest when he's at his most miserable and he needs to kind of drag other people into that space with him. And this whole like, you used to feel things, man, like you used to be on my level. And then David says, yeah, I was miserable. So now I have to be medicated. That dynamic is so great.

And that takes it out of this, oh, you just need to come out of your shell. It takes it out of that very simple kind of baseline, like simple dynamic and makes it resonate the way that human beings resonate. I mean, I don't want to armchair diagnose this guy. But, like, he definitely shows signs of depression, manic depression, that line that David has about, like, I'm on meds. I am. There's very clearly, yes, there's a performance and there's a performative act. to the Kieran Kolkin character. At the same time, I think there's kind of a fine line between performance

and just like who this person is, how they just can't help it. Like, there are certain people who their emotions and their feelings are just so all over themselves in ways that the rest of us find hard to process. And I think that especially comes up when he is going after the tour guide, James, who's played by Bull Sharp, who is a, he's, that character. Again, very true to how tours are. And, you know, when he goes after James, he's like, you're just giving us stats. You're not connecting.

We haven't talked to a single Polish person here. And it's like, you know, he has a point. But it's the way he goes about it. It is his abrasiveness. The fact that he just like, he's all in and no, like, there is no sort of filter. To me is just part of what I think people are drawn to with this performance. For me, I didn't find either one of them. I mean, I think they're both exhausting, both characters.

Like, they're both exhausting in their own ways. But I also see myself, I am very much a type A. I would leave 11 messages. I'd be like, why are you not here at the airport? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, I would be concerned. So I sympathize with both of these characters. And I think that is part of what makes this movie special.

And but the expectations of what we think this story could go. But, Andrew, you mentioned earlier, you know, this idea of, Holocaust Remembrance Tours. And I, let's dig a little bit more into that and sort of how this movie wrestles with the fact of these things. Yeah, absolutely. These Holocaust sites, obviously, are all over Europe. If you've been to Poland, you've probably visited one. And it's such an odd thing when you think about, you know, probably my favorite scene in the movie is when they're on the train heading to the concentration camp. And Benji has this freak out where everybody thinks he's crazy, but he's saying, no, like, we're Jews riding on a train.

Like, doesn't that feel wrong, like, in this country? You don't feel weird being in a first-class car? No, we paid for it. It's not hurting anybody. Dude, we are Jews on a train in Poland. Think about it. The fact that he can't get over this is both a little bit absurd and also completely reasonable and rational.

Right. That dynamic, that feeling of unease that is prompted by these, like, center of realizations of, like, where we are and just trying to. to hold all of that pain and misery inside of you, even though that's an impossible task. These are some of the weird feelings that are prompted by, you know, being on a tour like this. And I think if I had a criticism of the film that I wanted more scenes like that, that were sort of willing to be a little punchier and kind of get under my skin a little bit more and really kind of think about the strangeness of like the Will Sharp character not being Jewish and like leading this tour

where he's not emotionally connected to any of this history that he's talking about. And, you know, the difference between just sort of wandering through a concentration camp and then, yeah, going back to your air-conditioned hotel or your bus or whatever. And the sort of dissonance between trying to make sense of pain and also realizing that you're, like, on vacation in a weird way. Like, there's so much material there. And I understand it, it's not exactly the movie's aim to, like, spend all of its time sort of critiquing this. mindset. But it's clear that Eisenberg is interested enough in it that I maybe wanted just a little bit more because it's so rich, you know, and it's so intriguing to like dig into. I see that. And I also think he's done the work he needs to do to kind of lay the groundwork for

that because we do have all these different people on the tour. They each react differently to Benji's freak out on the train, which is the way that the filmmaker is telling you, like, he's not wrong, he's not right. It's somewhere in the middle, and all these people are going to have different reactions to it. So it could have gone that way. Absolutely. Absolutely. I also see the character of Eloge. He's played by Kurt Agiawan. He is a Rwandan survivor of the genocide, and they have a couple of moments where him and Benji are connecting. And the fact that that character exists, and also this character is one who has converted to Judaism. And so seeing that sort of connection between like different histories, but the same kind of trauma and the same, one of them

is even closer in our time span than the other. But seeing those things kind of melded together, I did see that as a way of Eisenberg trying to sort of get at that sort of punchiness in a way. And he, we don't see as much of his reaction to these things, but we do see them as he interacts with Benji. And he is one of the people on the tour who's very sympathetic to Benji and who, like seems to really like feel and understand why he would be so concerned and so conflicted by this. But it's even more interesting because he has actually lived it. Like he is a survivor of the genocide.

He is not one or two generations removed. He is a survivor. And then it's like when they first meet Benji's like almost congratulating him on being a survivor of the genocide. But then later like turns on him when he doesn't feel like, you know, this character's paying enough respect to the tour. I really like that. I like that weird tension.

Right. Yeah, I can understand, though, you know, Andrew, you're concerned about it not feeling punchy enough. And maybe that is sort of, there is a world where this could have been a much heavier movie and maybe it wouldn't have been as like raved about or loved by critics as much as possible. But I think a lot of people might even just hear the word Holocaust in the log line without even knowing anything about it and be like, oh, this is too much for me.

And it's like, to me, at least, it struck just the right chords and the right notes. And it's a very difficult needle to thread. I definitely agree. And we definitely should emphasize that even though this is a quote unquote Holocaust movie, this is not a somber, you know, graphic thing to have to sit through. It really is light and very enjoyable. And because it approaches the subject matter kind of sideways and from a vantage point that I don't recall ever seen. in a mainstream drama before, it's much more palatable than what you might think of as a movie

that, like, fits that description. Yeah, it's 90 minutes. I say again, tight, economy, efficient. In and out, and you know all of these characters by the end. And we would all recommend it. Absolutely. We will probably be talking about this for a long time because we're hearing a lot of award season chatter, especially for Kieran Culkin.

We'll see how that goes. And once you've had the chance to check it out, you should definitely love that. us know about real pain. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH and on Letterboxed, no E, on the boxed, at letterbox.com slash NPR pop culture. We'll have

a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show, Andrew Laban, Glenn Weldon. Thanks so much for being here. Again, it was a pleasure, not a pain. Thank you. Thanks for having. And this episode was produced by Huffeufah and edited by Mike Katziv. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy, and Hello,

Come In provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Aisha Harris. We'll see you all tomorrow.