A Real Pain has gone down very well with the audience and critics. The last time I checked Rotten Tomatoes, it was sitting at 96%. I get why. Anti-semitism is on the rise* and this movie is another reminder (like The Zone of Interest) of the horrific mechanisation of anti-semitism. But A Real Pain left me cold even during its most powerful and visceral moments. It’s not because I’ve seen more Holocaust movies than any sane person should. It’s because it’s a movie too narrow in its perspective, that, just like the tour group central to the plot, keeps to a well-trodden and safe path.

Following the death of their grandmother, two cousins, Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg), Kaplan head to Poland to visit her birth home. They join a Holocaust tour group led by knowledgeable, non-Jewish guide James (Will Sharpe). Also on the tour is an older Jewish couple (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), a divorcee (Jennifer Grey) and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan). As they travel between sites of importance, the bad blood between Benji and David comes to a boil.

The cast is excellent. I especially liked Will Sharpe’s performance as the well-meaning tour guide. It’s a role that has cliche scribbled all over it, where Sharpe comes off as either clueless or obnoxious, but instead, he’s kind and respectful (even if Benji has a point about the inflexible nature of the tour—but I’ll come back to this).

A Real Pain rests on the dynamic between Culkin and Eisenberg—the tense relationship between two cousins who were once very close but have drifted apart. The best scenes are where Culkin and Eisenberg aren’t playing to type—manic for Culkin, awkward and anxious for Eisenberg—where they speak honestly and openly about their situation. For Benji (Culkin’s character), it’s particularly dark—with little meaning or purpose in his life, he was the one hit hardest by the death of their grandmother.***

At one point, the tour visit a Jewish cemetry. Benji, who is having a low period, attacks James for presenting Jewish life in Poland as a series of statistics and facts. Benji, while rude, is not wrong. There’s an earnest quality to James, a deference to the horror of the Holocaust that can be cold and detached.***  It says something that James is (deliberately) quiet during the most potent set piece in the movie, the trip to the Majdanek concentration camp. 

James aside, I had hoped that the scene at the cemetery would mark a turning point, that A Real Pain would open up, that the cousins or the tour group would gain a greater appreciation of the psychic damage the Holocaust left on Poland and its people. But, no. Aside from a scene where the cousins visit their grandmother’s house and talk briefly to a Polish man and his son in the home opposite, Eisenberg keeps things contained. Poland is a backdrop to be seen and used sparingly.****

I get it; review the movie on the screen, not the one you wanted to see. Fair enough. A Real Pain isn’t meant to be a movie about Poland or how the populace betrayed its Jewish community. The setting is a catalyst. At best, the cousin’s fraught relationship reflects that notion of betrayal. But for me, those same discussions, arguments, and moments of reconciliation could have occurred against any backdrop—Christ, even a Universal Studios tour. Maybe if I’d been more invested in the relationship between the cousins, I’d have been more forgiving of the film’s refusal to take advantage of its setting.*****

*I live in Melbourne, Australia (I’m also Jewish). A Synagogue not far from me was fire-bombed. In Sydney, there have been multiple anti-semitic attacks. I have never seen it this bad in Australia.

**He’s a favourite to win the Oscar (I think for best supporting). He’s good, but we know this performance from Culkin. There’s nothing here that we haven’t seen in Succession.

***Implicit is the idea that because he’s not Jewish, James can’t fully appreciate the psychic scars the Holocaust has left on the Jewish people—not just the generation that experienced it, but the generations that followed.

****Even the cousin’s Jewishness is a side issue. Unlike the others on the tour, Benji and David seem to care little about their cultural identity—less so now that their Grandmother has died.

*****The other members of the tour get the thinnest of character glosses. There’s a hint of a relationship between Culkin and Jennifer Grey’s character, but it never gets past that. Kurt Egyiawan was also wasted. Again, I get that A Real Pain isn’t about them, but like the setting, they feel surplus to requirements. They could have been anyone.