A Real Pain (2024)

The Plot of A Real Pain: David and Benji are American Jews, cousins who had had a close relationship when young. However David has taken  on the responsibilities of family life, while Benji has remained a free spirit mainly, as he agrees himself, smoking pot in his mother’s basement. Despite their different views of life the cousins have go together to join a group of Americans who are visiting Poland with a focus on the Holocaust. Benji criticizes David for his now straight-laced lifestyle and generally falls off the rails in embarrassing ways during their social activities with the group. Benji allows them to miss their correct stop off the train when David is asleep, and falls out with him during a dinner, after which David reveals that Benji had attempted to commit suicide a year before. The following morning David cannot find Benji and panics only to find that his cousin had spent the night with Marcia, a mature divorcee also one of the tour group.  However they both smoke weed on the roofs of their hotels. Later they leave the tour and go in search of  their grandmother’s house.

Content:  No sex or nudity, maybe a bit of drinking and a lot of smoking of marijuana on the hotel rooftops. This almost a theme of the film. The guys go on the tour conducted by James, a British guide who is told off by Benji for knowing a lot but not getting close to real people. The main place they visit is a death camp at Majdanek, obviously real, said by James to have been abandoned by the Nazis before they destructed it, as had happened elsewhere. One of Benji’s objections is that they are only able to take the tour because they are well off and can travel first class on trains, as opposed to the victims of the Holocaust who had travelled in boxcars.

A View: This film cost an amazingly conservative $3 million and has seemed to have made money. I would have thought that some critics gave it a bit of an up vote due to its relationship with the Holocaust, but even so it was very watchable, in part as a travelogue of Poland. When the cousins left the tour group I was surprised to find that an hour had passed, and actually I was sorry they had done so. The film has received nominations from a number of award processes, particularly for Kieran Culkin for Best Supporting Actor. But you don’t have to go to the cinema to see it so you can wait for it on line. Not really comedic, but worth a watch.

Fun Fact: The part of the tour group member, Marcia, was taken by Jennifer Grey. Who she? Last seen by many of us as the teenage star of Dirty Dancing.