A Real Pain

I enjoyed quite a few movies at Sundance this year but A Real Pain was my favorite by far so I was really excited to see it again with my nephew at the Broadway last night.  I loved it even more upon a second viewing!  Two cousins, outgoing and charismatic Benji (Keiran Culkin) and uptight and reserved David (Jesse Eisenberg), take a guided tour through Poland to see where their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who has recently died, was born.  They come face to face with the tragedy of the Holocaust but they also feel the pain of realizing that, even though they were once close, they have drifted apart.  This is a moving, but surprisingly funny, portrait of generational trauma and the guilt that these cousins feel when they compare the vicissitudes of their daily lives with the horrors experienced by their grandmother.  I also really enjoyed the comparison between the way in which the cousins express their pain because David keeps everything bottled up inside while Benji expresses his every unfiltered emotion which endears him to the tour group despite the fact that he is often inconsiderate and offensive.  The scenes at the Majdanek concentration camp are very sobering and I was particularly struck by the observation from one of the characters that this evil was perpetrated so close to people going about their everyday lives because that was my response when I visited Dachau.  Eisenberg, rather unusually, is the more subdued straight man to Culkin's mania but they both give brilliant performances.  I frequently laughed at all of Culkin's antics but Eisenberg delivers a monologue that had me in tears.  Finally, I loved the use of Chopin in the soundtrack.  This is a very powerful exploration of how people confront pain and I highly recommend it.