Keiran Culkin deserves an Oscar for being A Real Pain

The actor best known for Succession is annoying but excellent in this funny film about a pair of Jewish cousins on a pilgrimage to visit the childhood home of their Holocaust survivor grandmother.

Stephen Romei

@PairRaggedClaws

2 min read

23 hours ago

Extroverted Benji Kaplan (Keiran Culkin) and his obsessive-compulsive cousin David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg) in A Real Pain.

“We’re on a f..king Holocaust tour. If now is not the time to grieve, to open up …”

So the edgy, extroverted Benji Kaplan (Keiran Culkin) tells his obsessive-compulsive cousin David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg) soon after the mismatched Jewish cousins from New York arrive in Poland.

Later, when the two board a train without tickets and David frets and points out they can afford the fare, Benji jokes, “We can argue Marxism while they are hauling us off to Siberia.”

Benji, who drops the F-word a lot, can be a real pain. So can the neurotic David. However, the title of this funny and moving film written and directed by Eisenberg, A Real Pain, touches on something far deeper.

Culkin, best known as Roman Roy in the 2018-23 television series Succession, is in the running for best supporting actor at the Academy Awards, due to be announced on March 3, and he should win. He is remarkable from the opening scene to the final moment.

The film is also nominated for best original screenplay. The dialogue between the cousins, who are the same age and grew up as brothers, turns from the comic to the poignant.

They are in Poland on a small-group guided tour led by James (Will Sharpe), an Oxford scholar who is not Jewish. The other members of the group include a 50ish divorcee (Jennifer Grey) and a Rwandan genocide survivor (Kurt Egyiawan) who has converted to Judaism.

The cousins are there for a family reason as well. They want to visit the childhood home of their Holocaust survivor grandmother. Her recent death shattered Benji. “She was just my favourite person in the world.”

David is more successful than Benji. He has a career, is married and has a young son. He has his own pain but thinks it is “unexceptional”. Benji is gregarious and charming but his pain takes him to a dark place. “People can’t walk around the world being happy all the time,’’ Benji says after having an outburst that disconcerts other members of the group.

David tells his cousin he’d “give anything” to be like him, socially speaking, but adds, “You light up a room and then you shit on everything inside it.”

Over and above the individual agonies is the historic pain of the Holocaust and the associated generational pain, all of which comes to a head when the group visits a concentration camp.

This film is a Polish-American co-production. The background music is mainly piano pieces written by 19th-century Polish composer Frederic Chopin, performed by contemporary Israeli-Canadian classical pianist Tzvi Erez. It is the perfect tone for a film that has a lot of perfect parts.