A Real Pain: Look At Him Go
A Real Pain (2024) dir. Jesse Eisenberg. Benji (left) & David (right)
In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 sophomore directorial effort wherein two once-close but now-estranged Jewish cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) embark on a heritage tour of Poland out of respect for their late Grandmother, we don’t really follow the most interesting character. We aren’t allowed to get too deep under the skull of the man who provokes and interests most. Our eyes are those of David, a self-proclaimed man without charm or bravery and an obviously awkward and cautious nature. Rather, it is Benji with his ever-present twinkle in the eyes who is David’s- and A Real Pain’s- focus and significant chunk of soul.
This isn’t something particularly innovative or notable in and of itself- the moment the frontier of entertainment dawdled beyond the Opera and the one-man play we have been witness to secondary and supporting characters who eclipse most others in a given work of art, brushstrokes at the edge of the canvas that make you think or smile a little more than the scene at it’s centre. People the film wanted you to meet and like, but not necessarily care too much about. Benji is, of course, no such small incidental character in A Real Pain, more a secondary protagonist that we just don’t get to share the intimate perspective of, a man only decipherable via the point of view of his ever-concerned, really-wishing-Benji-would-magically-get-okay-again-without-too-much-input cousin. However, what struck me most about Benji as the glow that fills the room as opposed to the lightbulb at its centre is how his very guarded and very frightening pain and struggling is the dramatic core of A Real Pain, something that we can only watch impotently from the outside looking in through the meek bespectacled eyes of David.
Benji is an outgoing, talkative and caring man who doesn’t enjoy making friends as much as he does doing things that stick in people’s minds- the fact that the former most times leads to the latter if you keep on doing those things seems incidental to Benji as he meanders through life jogging up to and asking an acquaintance why they’re walking alone through a park in the sunshine, or encourages his tour group to pose comically amongst a Warsaw Uprising monument because he believes their enjoyment in celebrating their valour is just as reverential as stoic reflection. Benji is also a blunt, direct and stubborn man who becomes screaming mad out of nowhere when his tour group don’t feel exactly as troubled as he does about being a Jew travelling in first class train seats ahead of a visit to Majdanek concentration camp. David, of course, does not engage or partake in anything offered or suggested by either extreme end of his cousin’s social spectrum. He’s much too respectful, much too polite… much too anxious and afraid of any eyes that may be upon him. Benji is as endearing as he is explosive, and his rudeness against his charisma is not a foible as much as it is an equally significant part of who he is, these two halves of him always wrestling one another with an inconsistent rate of victory for either side. I believed early on in A Real Pain that Benji would lose me, in the way that characters in script-forward walking-talking dramas like this sometimes do, because he was just so incessantly cute and whimsical and playfully disregarding of etiquette- and then he has his moments of genuine self-centeredness, of truly mishandled misunderstandings and hot-tempered reactions that made me wonder what was up with him before any of David’s revealing monologues or umming and ahhing arguments revealed something really was up with him. Again, this is nothing new or remarkable as is. Showing not telling is a phrase I personally invented recently and I notice it a lot in films with any degree of competence in writing and faith in their audience to wonder and let things niggle at them knowingly.
Benji tried to kill himself a few months prior. He has no consistent home, is clearly deeply depressed and grief-stricken, has no plan for his future- long-term, short-term or any term at all- and his ambitions seem to begin and end at bugging strangers, getting high and finding fistfulls of snacks to swipe to keep himself occupied. He adored his Grandmother, thinks of her often, remembers the ugly pink sandals she wore everywhere and considers her slapping him in public as one of the best things that ever happened to him because it suggested to him that she cared more about steering him right than how nasty it made her look to the strangers around her. He wanted so little, held onto only so much, and even that had to eventually go. As all things do, of course. But to live with the end of things you love in mind isn’t much of a way to live, especially not for the kind of man we see Benji to be in his happier, less-distracted moments. He’s a man who cares about people, who reacts emotionally to all things around him as and when they strike him- a man absolutely, heartbreakingly primed to be toppled by the loss of what which he loves. Benji is a man who lives in the moment in a way far removed from the twirling-in-the-pouring-rain inhibition of many a ‘carefree’ protagonist, but in a way that just seems to make immediate animal sense to him and often veers into the offputting or weird. Yet I feel like I got to know Benji enough to know that, hey man, that’s just Benji, he’s fine, don’t mind him.
It’s the truest shame of the story that David no longer knows that too.
What could David possibly do for him? The good one, the cousin with a stale but solid internet ad marketing job and nice brownstone house and a beautiful wife and child? That is not to say that there is nothing he could do, but that there is very little a man with the nature of David would be able to do for the cousin he once considered as close as a brother who has now zigged and zagged and wavered and lurched far beyond the furthest limits of David’s adult margins of comfort and politeness. In our current mental health epidemic and fascination, it would seem all it takes to save someone from the jaws of mental anguish is to pat them on the shoulder and ask if they’re alright, as is repeated often between television shows on terrestrial television or upon illuminated billboards on the side of bus stops beneath opaque stained-glass graffiti. Of course, this isn’t always enough, gestures and platitudes sometimes don’t clean and dress wounds. It’s a relief to know people care, even just passively, but the pain can’t always go away for the sheer reassurance that your loved ones hope it will.
Throughout A Real Pain, what Benji seems to lament the most about the distance that has grown between him and David is how he has become so much less emotional and sensitive in adulthood. He doesn’t cry at everything anymore, he doesn’t seem as affected by homesickness and the kind of broad and profound grieving that comes in the shape of talking dogs dying in animated movies as a boy and in visits to well-preserved concentration camps as a man. He misses the spark in David, the thing that made him warm and interesting and human. He misses him being a little more like him, the more obvious submission to rawer emotional impulses that overwhelm Benji still and was perhaps the bridge between these two very different men. A bridge that Benji probably really hoped would still be open and not too rickety when they reunited at the airport ahead of their flight to Warsaw.
It’s difficult to see someone you love suffer. It is a unique kind of fear and anxiety to know that you cannot easily find it in you to help them as best you can, that if a hard turn- or, God forbid, something unspeakable- were to happen to them, you would certainly live knowing you could have done just a little more. You dread the best and brightest parts of that person you love not being enough to save them also, that they couldn’t as strong for themselves as they perhaps always were for others. David lives with the ‘almost’, goes on worrying himself sick with the ‘what if’. “How could you do something so stupid to yourself?” David mutters under his breath through tears during a conversation that becomes surprisingly charged after he asks Benji what his plans are when they get back to America. Benji offers no answer to either question. He just turns away from the skyline they were gazing upon and finishes up the cherry of his joint. I think maybe he said “whatever” or made some kind of sarcastic remark that fizzled out in a handwave and eye roll in that very-Kieran Culkin delivery. I don’t remember if Benji did anything after David asked him that question, the most direct reference he makes about Benji’s struggling to his face in the entire film. I just remember noticing that his eyes weren’t as bright as usual, I just remember noticing that the twinkling in his eyes was just a reflection you notice when you’re looking for something in them- which are just what all twinkles in all eyes are.
When David and Benji finally arrive home to New York and say their goodbyes, David invites Benji to come and have dinner with his family, which Benji considers and politely declines. He then suggests Benji at least allow him to give him a lift to his train station from the airport, which Benji considers and again declines even faster than the first offer. They have their farewell, they share a hug, and off David goes home to the house and job and wife and child. Less worried than he was, assured that he finally offered Benji a little more than he had previously found comfortable to show him he is cared for and probably himself experiencing some kind of relief. Sometimes that’s all you have in you, the taboo of selfishness and the mission for self-preservation in the face of a loved one’s immense struggling that pushes you to do something a little more challenging to find the confidence and acceptance that you did all you could possibly do.
David probably felt something like that. Probably. We don’t see it because for the second time in A Real Pain, as first we did in the film’s opening shot, we stay with Benji alone. For the second time in A Real Pain, we watch Benji sit on a bench in an airport- vacant, sad, smaller than usual, looking at all the busy, interesting people around him. He is not entirely fixed by his and David’s shared experience. He is not completely back. We look into his eyes and see there is still something big and bad and shapelessly frightening in them. But at least the twinkle is still there, back in his big brown eyes, if anyone was looking for it before we also say goodbye and head home, for whatever that’s worth.
Maybe a whole lot. Maybe.
