Jesse Eisenberg created the film “A Real Pain” to depict the emotional distress between two Jewish American cousins touring modern-day Poland as they learn more about the trauma of the Holocaust.
“I wanted to talk about that pain (between cousins) but set against the backdrop of something so much more objectively worse, like World War Two trauma,” Eisenberg said.
He wanted to pose an essential question to the audience and himself.
“What pain is valid? Are we supposed to take these two young men seriously, even though their pain could not compare to massive, mass-scale terror, or are we supposed to dismiss them because their lives are irrelevant against the backdrop?” he added.
“A Real Pain” is distributed by Searchlight Pictures, a unit of Walt Disney DIS.N, and arrives in theaters on Friday. The film follows Eisenberg's different-tempered cousins David and Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, as they reunite for a group tour of Poland to learn more about their grandmother and Jewish history.
The movie also stars Will Sharpe as James, the group tour guide, along with Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes, who play tour group members.
Things take a turn when the cousins' emotional tension rises, and they work to process their complex feelings about their family.
It wasn’t until watching himself play Benji on-screen that Culkin indeed analyzed his character.
“Knowing somebody in my life who's pretty similar to him (Benji)” helped Culkin understand the character more deeply.
For Sharpe, Benji significantly influences the rest of the characters through the historical tour.
“I think Benji, Kieran's character, impacts each of our characters along the film's journey, and often he sort of does it in almost quite a competitive way,” said Sharpe, who has also appeared in the TV series "The White Lotus."
Sharpe added that Benji challenges James's conduct during the tour, which makes him think about his job differently.
By contrast, Sharpe sees David, Eisenberg's character, as “fascinated and frustrated” by his cousin’s constant transparency and outspokenness.
A Real Pain posterIMDb
For Grey, the film comes down to a story of people who are healing.
“The cure for pain is healing, and it doesn't mean it goes away. It just means there's perhaps some mitigating of the pain, some shift in perspective,” she said.
For her, from the horror of the Holocaust to the struggles that the cousins face in the modern day, the movie is about the overall pains of life.
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