“A Real Pain,” A Journey to the Roots of Trauma

A Real Pain ***

by Jesse Eisenberg

American film, 1h30

Jesse Eisenberg himself traveled to Poland a few years ago, following in the footsteps of his great-aunt Doris, a Holocaust survivor. He wondered what kind of person he would have become if his entire family had not been expelled from the country. When he returned, he wrote a play, The Revisionist, which was staged off-Broadway in 2013 with Vanessa Redgrave, but which he never managed to adapt into a film.

It was an advertisement for one of these "memory trips", organized for Americans in the footsteps of their family victims of the Nazis, that gave him the idea for this road trip that is both funny and very moving. The story of two cousins ​​that life has separated and who meet again on a journey in the footsteps of their grandmother Dory, who recently died.

The characters of David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) could not be more opposed. The former, eternally anxious, machine-gun-fired, leads an orderly life in New York with a stable job in digital marketing, an apartment in Brooklyn, a wife and an adorable little boy. The latter is a sort of flamboyant outsider, still living with his mother, who charms his interlocutors as much as he annoys them and who poorly hides his psychological fragility.

A melancholic “buddy movie”

When they find their small group of travelers in Warsaw, it is Benji who attracts all the light and takes things in hand, even if it means shaking up their boring British guide a little, incapable of managing this whimsical character. In the first part, Jesse Eisenberg plays with malice and a good dose of Jewish humor, Woody Allen style, of this gap between the two heroes as well as the absurdity of these "Holocaust Tours", where American tourists find the comfort of large hotels and good restaurants after having visited the places of suffering of their family.

Suffering is precisely at the heart of the film. The one we experience and the one we inherit. Behind the very different ways in which the two cousins ​​approach existence, there is the same malaise. More controlled in David who, under the appearance of normality, tries to manage his obsessive compulsive disorders as best he can. More eruptive in Benji, who we quickly understand has just been through difficult times. The time of the journey is for us that of the progressive unveiling of their shared past, when memories resurface, and for them of a form of clarification on the unsaid and the wounds of their relationship.

A duo that works perfectly well

There is humor in this strange companionship, tenderness when they rediscover their childhood complicity during an eventful train journey, and gravity when they are caught up in family history during a visit to a Jewish cemetery or the Majdanek camp. What is real pain ? And can it be legitimate, in light of that experienced by an entire people?

David and Benji are both the product of this story and the spoiled children of American capitalism. The source of a form of painful schizophrenia, perfectly highlighted by Jesse Eisenberg.

The actor, revealed to the general public by David Fincher 's The Social Network in the role of Mark Zuckerberg, has since navigated between arthouse films and commercial franchises. After When You Finish Saving the World (not released in France), he holds the camera for the second time with this very personal, intimate chronicle that takes us through all the emotions.

His duo with Kieran Culkin – Logan Roy's tortured offspring in the series Succession – works perfectly well. The latter is amazing in the role of this cousin with bipolar tendencies as endearing as he is detestable, and deeply lost. His performance also earned him the Golden Globe for best supporting actor, a well-deserved award, and an Oscar nomination in the same category.