The film, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, mines the comedy and drama of vacationing with a family member.
A Real Painopens with David Kaplan ( played by the film ’s writer and theater director , Jesse Eisenberg ) in a taxi on his way to the airport , madly call his cousin , Benji ( Kieran Culkin ) , who ’s not pick up the headphone . Worried that Benji won’tmaketheir flight , he bequeath a series of increasingly harried voicemail . David arrives at the airport , only to discover a very unworried Benji has somehow beaten him there .
It ’s an economic character intromission , one that perfectly reveals how David and Benji lay out the two types of travelers : the anxiousairport dadwho does n’t seem to translate the concept of a vacation , and the floater who ’s dangerously chill , yet always manages to make it through unscathed .
Eisenberg ’s film , which also touts a production credit from Emma Stone , follows the first cousin on a trip to Poland , as they set out to trace their recent grandmother ’s past as a survivor of the Holocaust . Making its one shot from Sundance to the New York Film Festival , the picture show has been enjoying someearly acclaimbefore its prescribed spill on November 1 . It ’s one that change state the construct of the bro - y road trip motion picture on its head , because even though the cousins smoke a lot of weed together , it ’s finally a head trip aboutfeelings .
Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Benji and David begin their slip inWarsaw , where they ’re join by a tour group of Jews desire to find out some deeper connection to their heritage . The guess ofPoland , a body politic that perhaps has n’t gotten its fair due in Hollywood movie theater , are neither excessively romantic nor starkly commonplace . There ’s real beauty in the close - up shots of the symmetric , Soviet - style apartment pulley-block , and the vivacious townhouses that delineate the cobblestone street of Old Town Lublin .
As the tour group moves from the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw to the Jewish Gate in Lublin , Benji and David begin to get on each other ’s nerves , and beyond being one of the fundamental tensions of the film , it ’s where the most comedy Lie . We ’ve all establish ourselves aggravated by the mo quirks of ourtravel partner , the things that can only come out fromshared hotel roomsandlong power train ridestogether . The jokes are sharp , ambitiously set against the morose backdrop of Holocaust tourism — at one spot Benji denote to it as a “ gerontological tour”—but they never take away from the historical weight of it all .
The cousin ’s differences go beyond the mutual exclusiveness of traveler type A and B. David wants the trip to have an air travel of worshipful properness . Benji suggests sleuth a medical combat scene at the Warsaw Uprising repository . Of course , Benji ’s good luck charm acquire over the whole term of enlistment chemical group , with David left as the lensman .
Culkin ’s Benji is not only unlike Roman Roy ofSuccession , both of whom chuck out around F - turkey with schoolboy zip . But whereas Roman is often disguise a mystic sensitivity , Benji is effusive about his feel , thanking his full cousin for enter on this trip with him in one view and igniting a holier - than - thou tirade about the hypocrisy of traveling to a concentration camp in a first - class train cabin in another . Culkin deftly beguile the paradox of Benji ’s character , a figure who can so well share in a hugger-mugger language with others , but can just as quickly fall into the trappings of condescendingness — or worsened , not even agnise the mess he ’s made .
David , who has a wife and tiddler inNew York City , has a traditional sense of anteriority and a hold capacity for emotional response . He take care down on and simultaneously envies Benji , his single , stoner cousin-german , who lights up whatever room he walks into ( even if it ’s a Jewish cemetery ) . Their moral force is a complex one , revealing the trauma they ’ve both experienced , the ways in which they ’re often competing with one another , and , at long last , how they deal with their emotions .
After a unmanageable visit to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin , the cousin reflect on how they ’ve struggled to bring off — and show — the bother that ’s been pass onto them . This is well captured when David at last reaches his breaking point . Eisenberg performs an arresting monologue that ’s nipping and heart - wrench all at once . What ’s clear , even at the start of the cinema , when Benji asks to see videos of David ’s son , is that the two cousins love each other profoundly .
And that ’s the beauty of travel with a do it one . You might be subject to a microscopic view of every annoying timbre they possess , but you ’re also gift the opportunity to zoom out , to see a different side to them , the one that subsist outdoors of their common setting . More often than not , we leave the trip , as the motion picture ’s subtly sentimental last scene calls us to do , with a little more empathy .
