A Real Pain is essentially a Coffee and Cigarettes meets The Trip just guys talking for 80 minutes deal. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are cousins on a tour of Poland reconnecting with their heritage after the death of their Jewish grandmother. There’s a train scene- but there’s no guns and no one ends up on the roof of the train- no no wake up it’s good I promise. But more-so what it is is a few short notes on suffering. As you undoubtedly assumed from the synopsis; the trauma and intergenerational legacy of the Holocaust furnishes the main throughline of the film, exemplified by the two main characters and a supporting cast of characters variously connected or removed from it. It also provides us with our most accessible and tangible type of suffering. We go to a monument to the Warsaw Uprising, to a Jewish cemetery, and eventually to Majdanek concentration camp. An epistemological excursion through the physical remnants of suffering on its largest scale in recent memory. 

The second type of pain we are presented with is the quiet and unremarkable suffering of David. He has a beautiful wife and child, an online advertising job that no really he does like and actually is important if you’d just let him explain, a little high functioning anxiety but it’s normal to leave someone 5 voicemail messages on the way to meet them at the airport right? You know him, he has a film camera, his favourite film is Seven Samurai, he subscribes to some guy on Twitter’s Substack, he’s the 21st century Ubermensch. Remember? He took you to that little village in Italy for your first holiday together- or you are him, in which case hey good for you man. We are slightly heavy handedly informed that he is a little OCD, a little socially awkward and a lot self-conscious. Or perhaps self-aware would be a better description. As he says, and as every Letterboxd review of the film starts: “My pain is unexceptional so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.” His wounds are neat and obsessively well managed. His pain is meticulously compartmentalised in its proper place in his carry-on bag, right next to his Airpods and his copy of Sapiens.

Benji on the other hand, is a giant gaping wound, interesting to look at but sticky to get too close to. Or more accurately a sort of mania fuelled volcano wherein even if you can navigate the often acerbic always hyper-charismatic safety fence of one-sided overfamiliarity the closest you can get to him, to his pain, is tentatively shuffling around the edge of the crater. You can smell the (dope infused) smoke but the fire’s too far away to burn. But everyone likes him, both within the film and as an audience we’re almost resentful that we’re tethered to David’s quotidian middle-class neuroses. We don’t want to watch our insensate reflection take a Zoloft and sleep for a neat eight hours, we want the guided heritage tour of the bottle of sleeping pills self-annihilation extravaganza. When they eventually arrive at their grandmother’s house there’s a strange sense of disappointment, an anti-climax. David says he ‘doesn’t know what he was expecting’, when you peer over the edge of the crater what do you think the inside of the volcano will feel like? How does it feel when you fall in and find it doesn’t feel like much of anything at all? They’ve ended their Odyssey of ancestral suffering at what was supposed to be the emotional locus of the experience, and it’s unremarkable, because it’s not quite their own.

On the train Benji rages against the lack of emotion everyone around him is feeling about their situation, about how they cut themselves off from other people’s pain. Only I don’t think it’s so malicious. I don’t mean to echo a Kiplingesque we’re all islands sentiment; the entire point of the trip is to reconnect, both with eachother and with the trauma suffused into their bloodline. And it works! Realistically, aside from grandiose desires to make your hurt interesting David is in a much better position, not least because he has a family, because he has people to talk to beyond demanding to know why they’re walking alone and extracting their divorcee gossip. David tells Benji that if he had his mind he could be the President. He loves, hates and wants to be him. Everyone loves Benji, he inspires endless warmth, openness and benevolence despite his incredibly erratic, often rude and abrasive behaviour. David and the audience share the same false vision of some inherent magic in the mentally ill. The tortured artist, Buckleyian, Temu, 27 club romanticisation. If only my pain were more like their pain. If only I could be the one berrating the guide and being thanked for it, instead of being the one apologising. But at the end of the film we leave Benji alone in the airport, where you meet all kinds of crazy people. He’s invited to David’s house for dinner, of course, and we want him to go. We’ve seen Planes, Trains and Automobiles, we know how the ending is supposed to work- he’s supposed to go home with him, communicate honestly and connect with his family, manage his emotions, get a job- fucking meditate or something. But he can’t. We are once again reminded that he is not our main character, he is at best a fun element of chaos to enjoy briefly and then discard and at worse a hereditary liability endured on holidays and special occasions. A tourist in the lives of others. 

In order to understand their grandmother’s pain they go on a literal tour of it, to specific places and specific moments in history, to read it into monuments and murals. And then they go home, with the understanding that it wasn’t at all what they expected it to be, that despite standing where she stood they’re still just tourists in her pain. We know within the first ten minutes of the film that there is something wrong with Benji. We spend the film mapping the topography of his hurts, the instability of his emotions, the real or perceived abandonment by his cousin, the suicide attempt. Then after 80 minutes realise we’re just tourists too. Often loving tourists with the best intentions, to see and outline the exact shape of the suffering so that we may better learn from it, to fix it, remove it. But as David and Benji learn, seeing is not the same as understanding. An MRI of an emphysemic lung won’t help you understand what suffocating feels like. Just because someone can see the shape of your hurt doesn’t mean they know how that shape fits inside you, and more importantly it doesn’t mean that they can find space for that shape, for your shape, in their own lives. It is a specific pain and it is real but it’s just yours, regardless of whether you’re going home or staying in the airport with the rest of the crazy people.