A Real Pain - It's a Low Information World

And We’re All Just Surviving In It

The term “low information voter” describes (or derides) people who cast their ballot despite not knowing much about the candidates or what they stand for.

Jesse Eisenberg’s seemingly unassailable movie A Real Pain — about a tour of Poland emphasizing the Holocaust — is well-suited for those who want to know as little as possible about the history of that time, or about the fictional characters who populate the movie.

After an hour and twenty-nine minutes, what do we really know about cousins Benji and David Kaplan (Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg) that couldn’t be intuited from their awkward meet-cute at a kiosk in JFK (punctuated by room-temperature yogurt)?

The Oscars are less than a month away. The hype about A Real Pain more palpable than the Generation Alpha energy at a Taylor Swift parking-lot concert.

Succession’s Roman Roy (Culkin) wasn’t a lock to take over Waystar Royco, but he seems a diminutive shoe-in to poach Best Supporting Actor.

I say “poach” for reasons that are both entirely self-evident and (perhaps) require some unpacking.

Culkin is splendid at being, well, Culkin.

As Roman, he’s a “chaos goblin” (sorry - it’s an oft-abused phrase by now, and I have no idea who first ascribed it to him). He’s all-awkward energy, largely low self-esteem, and mostly madcap BDE (big dork energy).

He’s self-loathing, but charming. Just ask Gerri, who roleplays with him from beyond a locked bathroom door, and (low-key) grooms him to be CEO.

Roman smokes weed. He gets a thrill from being humiliated by Gerri.

In A Real Pain, as Benji Kaplan, Culkin “plays” a stoner who mails himself pot in Poland, and whose greatest thrill in life was being slapped across the kisser by his grandma. He entirely lacks a filter, bringing a cemetery tour to a steel-wheels grinding halt when he critiques the guide’s overreliance on statistics (“There are real people under there,” he bemoans).

Whether Benji or Roman, he’s really just Kieran. He’s an atomic Chupacabra — a crass wind-up toy that (occasionally) spits out something thoughtful — by accident, or the way that a smashed Timex gets it right twice daily.

There are on-line conversations about the nuance that Culkin brings to Benji — the emotional depth, the extra gear that he finds on the metaphorical transmission…that Benji is nice, sweet and so on…that there’s never been a more accurate depiction of on-screen mental illness.

What I saw in Benji was an overcompensating, profoundly insecure person with a social anxiety disorder. And yes. He was depressed. He self-medicated.

That was Roman, too. Perhaps Benji Kaplan’s factory setting is less acerbic than Roman Roy’s. Okay. I’ll concede that.

The last shot of the film (back at JFK, coming full-circle, no one has changed, nothing has been figured out, there’s no resolution) is a tracking shot of waiting passengers who are mostly engaged with each other. The camera finally settles on Culkin. He looks panicked, alone, and looking for some form of human connection achieved through a random conversation with the next warm body to take the empty seat next to him.

As the credits rolled, my wife said, “I don’t get it.”

I don’t think there wasn’t anything “to get,” per se.

Jesse Eisenberg’s latest film has been so successful because it doesn’t ask anything of its viewers.

It has no memorable lines of dialogue — not one that I can recall — [save for a slice of Benji’s borderline-personality-disorder rant from the cemetery tour]. I just watched it last night, and I found myself not mentally collecting quotes as I usually do. There’s nothing to decode. No verbal puzzles, nor potent mise-en-scenes to tease some answer out of.

Eisenberg is no David Mamet, nor is he Woody Allen (despite doing one Hell of an impression, often within the fictional walls of this film). He couldn’t even pass for a clever sitcom writer (as far as Jewish humor goes, what line from A Real Pain could you pit against any bit of dialogue randomly chosen from any episode of Seinfeld — even Season One)?

Curb Your Enthusiasm isn’t even (technically) “written” — it’s based on a treatment. There’s a great deal of improv. But think about the linguistic cultural impact of both shows. It’s astounding.

The shooting script for A Real Pain seems like a first draft at best. Culkin may bring a raw, unpolished, unrehearsed “realism” to his characters, but I’m struggling to remember anything word-for-word, or something that made me laugh (outside of the situational comedy derived from posing with Polish soldier statues — something that cousin David won't do out of an undefined, vague respect for his heritage, and a social contract he’s working really hard to keep with no one in particular).

At Majdanek, I’m shown that concentration camps had gas chambers and ovens. I’m told that body hair was completely shaved off victims. In a previous scene, I’m generically informed that there was once a vibrant city beyond the “Jewish Gate.”

I knew these things already. I think most of us did.

Initially, I found it odd that the tour of Poland’s Holocaust sites and WWII memorials were unaccompanied by anything that resembled “historical knowledge.” Just as Benji wanted to silence James (the guide), perhaps we, too, drown-out museum docents, focused instead on our (literal) devices and (figurative) desires.

A Real Pain feels like a buddy picture without a meaningful buddy. A road trip that few of us would want to take.

Is that what makes the film work for so many? It seizes upon a flattened-affect world — we’re all numb from our pain, or numb from our lack of real struggle, or unwilling to confront the fact that our ancestors didn’t actually have it better. Or - perhaps - that we have no idea what “better” even means, or what we’d do with it if we achieved such a rarefied state.

I came into the film having both loved and hated Succession, as the fourth season is a brutal bit of spectating the lives of truly broken people.

I wonder if A Real Pain resonates because it doesn’t fix anything at all. The fractured cousins leave each other as they’d found each other, in the same exact location, too. David makes the empty gesture of a dinner invite. Benji demures, as he’s off (eventually) to reroof a friend’s adobe home in Binghamton (which sounds preposterous in its own right).

It seems that people - increasingly - appreciate films and TV shows that don’t add anything new to the conversation, starring actors that play themselves, with circular plots that are well-tread and offensively familiar. Static narratives that, like life itself, don’t move the needle. I get it: we don’t ever really change, nor can we change the lives of others.

It’s also true that we don’t like people who try hard (or, at least, people who are “try-hards”), but I do appreciate filmmakers, and actors, who put in the work.

There was a time when winning a Best Supporting Actor meant that the actor had created a unique character, usually one existing within the context of a serious work.

A Real Pain’s setting, the real history, the context of Poland in WWII doesn’t get any heavier, and Culkin’s Benji doesn’t seem deserving of it.

But on March 2nd, he’ll give the speech that we’ve all heard him give before.