Producers: Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Semler and Ewa Puszczyńska   Director: Jesse Eisenberg   Screenplay: Jesse Eisenberg   Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes   Distribution: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: B

If one were forced to categorize Jesse Eisenberg’s road trip film, tragicomedy probably fits best.  But “A Real Pain” is only fitfully funny, and the drama it depicts in its characters pales beside that they are contemplating from many years’ distance.  It does, however, portray both in a tone that allows for some dark humor and sharp observation. 

Eisenberg’s script shares its basic premise with Julia von Heinz’s recent “Treasure,” in which an American journalist (Lena Dunham) dragged her hesitant father, a Holocaust survivor played by Stephen Fry, on a journey through Poland in an attempt to recover her family history.  Here the travelers are the Kaplan cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who have been left a bequest by their much beloved, recently deceased, grandmother Dory, also a Holocaust survivor, to make a similar trip together.  The purpose is to immerse them, to some extent at least, in her background, but also, it would seem, to encourage them to rediscover the brotherly closeness they’d once enjoyed.

Despite that earlier camaraderie, they’ve grown up to be very different.  David, though skittish and unconfident, is the responsible one, with a solid job in New York City (digital advertising), along with a loving wife and son.  Benji, on the other hand, is a drug-addicted slacker, living with his mother in Binghamton and, we eventually learn, a self-destructive bent.  Yet he’s outgoing, easily charming everyone he encounters in spite of a habit of being honest with them, sometimes brutally so. 

David, a fastidious planner, has booked them for a group tour of Poland that will allow them to detach themselves for a separate trip to their grandmother’s erstwhile home town.  Their meeting at the airport for their departure is effusive, though the fact that Benji’s been there people-watching for hours takes David aback.  At the Warsaw hotel, to which Benji has mailed a packet of choice weed, they meet James (Will Sharpe), the intense British historian who will lead the tour, and their fellow journeyers: recently-divorced Marcia (Jennifer Grey), remaking her life after coming back to New York from California; older middle-class couple Mark and Diane (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy); and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who converted to Judaism after enduring the Rwandan genocide.

All of the group members are spotlighted briefly along the way as they pass through sites that James chooses as emblematic of the Jewish experience in Poland—a memorial to the resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, a Jewish cemetery, the old Jewish quarter in Lublin, the Majdanek concentration camp near the city—and the actors take maximum advantage of the opportunities, as when Michal Dymek’s camera catches each face as they pass the opening to the camp’s gas chamber.  But still they’re portrayed largely in terms of their interactions with the cousins, and particularly Benji, whose oversized personality, attractive but often off-putting—fascinates them, leading them to embrace even his most outrageous ideas, like posing as fighters beside the sculpted resistance heroes in the Warsaw memorial.  Benji even shames James into admitting that his constant recitation of facts is inappropriate at sites, like the cemetery, where silence would be welcome.

But it’s the complicated relationship between the cousins that’s the fulcrum of the narrative.  David is often embarrassed and apologetic about Benji’s actions, and upset when Benji belittles him or does things that undermine the smoothness of the trip, like neglecting to wake him at a train station where they were scheduled to disembark.  A train ride is also involved in one of Benji’s outbursts about riding the tracks so comfortably when Jews were once crammed in cattle cars on their way to death camps.

The cousins’ tangled bond is nicely caught in the screenplay and direction, but it’s fully brought to life by the two lead performances.  In many respects Eisenberg is doing familiar shtick, but he does it with considerable nuance while ceding center stage in great measure to Culkin, who manages to capture poignantly both his character’s manic charisma and the profound sadness beneath the exterior.  When, having found where Dory once lived and finding the current occupants not terribly welcoming, they fly back to New York and part at the airport, each resuming his life, the viewer is left to ponder what has changed in their understanding of the past, each other, and themselves.

Simply shot by Dymek, edited without frills by Robert Nassau, and scored almost completely with excerpts of Chopin played by pianist Trvi Erez, “A Real Pain” nimbly juggles confronting historical horror and coming to terms with familial relationships that have evolved over time.  Serious at its core but seizing opportunities for bleak humor, it represents a substantial accomplishment for both multi-hyphenate Eisenberg and the mercurial Culkin.