Sweet, heartfelt, and funny, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain caught me in post-election malaise and showed me a way through. It is most compelling as a zeroing-in on a now-strained, forever-close family relationship between two cousins raised like brothers (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) as they travel through time and history to see their late Jewish grandmother’s birthplace; it is least compelling when Eisenberg's screenplay fails to measure up to the humanity of the performances. 

A Real Pain is about the tension of absence. David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) arrive in Poland after months of distance and struggle to re-learn how to relate to each other as adults after the loss of their beloved grandmother and a ramping up of Benji’s self-destructive behavior. They join a group of Jewish tourists that includes, among others, a recent divorcee (delightful to see Jennifer Grey) and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide (Kurt Egyiawan). It’s not just a desire to connect with ancestral land that placed these folks on this trip; they are all trying to understand themselves better in the context of what they have lost. This trip, which David's and Benji's grandmother laid out for them in her will, was meant to bring the cousins together and face their sadness head-on as a family. 

The cousins' relationship to grief benefits from the most screen time, and gets the most powerful catharsis in the bunch when they eventually leave the tour to visit their grandmother’s childhood home. Where David and Benji are beautifully drawn in their relationship and as individuals, the script fails to account for the depth and humanity of the other members of the tour group. Marsha (Grey) introduces herself with a beautiful monologue about her divorce and her heritage, and then disappears into the backdrop for the remainder of the film. Egyiawan’s Eloge is particularly narratively short-changed—he was the only member of the group who’d personally survived genocide, and I felt frustrated on his behalf that respect for his story became secondary to accommodating Benji’s mood swings. 

Where David is anxious and reserved, Benji is erratic and charming, and he is ultimately forgiven (and rewarded!) by all involved for his outbursts. When Eloge tells the tour group about his upbringing and experiences of genocide, Benji’s loud interruptions and wide-eyed interest become the most memorable parts of the story. I don’t think Eloge owes Benji forgiveness, or even kindness. But Eloge forgives, with a smile and an aphorism, in a way I think is somewhat dehumanizing and diminishes his own story. While David and Benji are complex characters, Eisenberg’s screenplay takes significantly less care to draw non-lead characters out beyond their most basic biographical details. A Real Pain would be a better film if it expressed the same amount of curiosity about the members of the tour group as it does about the two leads. 

A Real Pain is at its sharpest depicting grief as a series of elephants in rooms, of ghost towns beneath well-trodden cobblestones. As David and Benji process the weirdness of being American in the place that expelled their family within the last century, tour guide James (Will Sharpe) narrates a series of images of modern-day buildings that used to be Jewish-owned, operated, and loved. A prickly sense of wrongness infiltrates your mind—you can almost see what used to be underneath what currently is. Early in the film, Benji tells David that sometimes, when he looks at him, he can see their grandmother. There lies that same prickly wrongness, in the knowledge that you are holding on to something, some unconscious part of yourself that is owed to someone who’s no longer around to accept credit. 

As monumental as loss feels, whether it be on the micro level of losing your grandmother or the macro level of knowing who and what we all have collectively lost to global genocide, there is comfort in having someone who knows you really well point out the ways the subject of your grief lives on in your example. Embracing loss means claiming it, and finding your way back to the lost thing within yourself.