A Real Pain movie review

posted in: Crime, Drama, True story, War | 1

MOVIE TITLE:   A Real Pain

This dramedy is now playing in theaters and on Fandango at Home.

RATING:    R

LENGTH:  1 hour 30 minutes

Movie Review Mom GRADE:   A

SPONSOR of Today’s movie review:

My twin sister and I wrote this “how to” book on how to research your roots and climb your family tree.  You can find it on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3BSUhrO   It’s also available as an audiobook!

IN A NUTSHELL:

Congratulations to Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote, directed, and starred in the movie.  Already, the film has received 75 nominations and won 31 of them. It was nominated for several Golden Globe awards, so we’ll see if that folds into some Oscar wins.

The story is about mix-matched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother, but their old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.

TIPS FOR PARENTS:

  •  Profanity and lots of F-bombs
  •  Kids will be bored.
  •  The tour group sees the inside of a concentration camp, while the tour guide explains the horrors that happened there.
  • Polish is spoken a few times without subtitles.
  • A man slaps another man.

THEMES:

  • Judaism
  • Holocaust
  • Poland
  • Pain
  • Resilience
  • Mental Health
  • Remembering

THINGS I LIKED:

  • We get to spend some time in Poland!  It’s on my Bucket List to go there someday.  My husband has ancestors from Gdansk. I don’t think they were Jewish, but I need to research that side of his family tree more.   In the movie, the characters visit their mother’s home in Poland, which is the same area where Jesse Eisenberg’s real-life ancestors settled in Lublin.
  • We get to learn a bit about Poland and its culture.  For example, Kieran Culkin’s character buys a traditional Polish hat called highlander or Gorale hat.  It’s traditionally worn by men living in the mountains in southern Poland.  We also see people eating Zurek, a Polish soup made with sourdough, which gives it a sour taste.
  • To Jesse Eisenberg’s credit, this is the first time a narrative feature film was allowed to shoot at an actual German concentration camp where 59,000 Jews were murdered. We get to see the inside areas of the famous Majdanek just 2 miles outside Lublin.  It’s hard to imagine a bustling town of people living so close to such a horrific place. Back when I was in college, I got to visit Dachau, one of the first concentration camps in Germany. I will never forget the images, nor how they made me feel that day.
  • The cast includes Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey, Daniel Oreskes, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Will Sharpe. Kieran Culkin steals the show.  If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he is the younger brother of Macaulay Culkin from the Home Alone franchise, among other films.
  • I remember when people criticized Jennifer Grey when she got a nose job many years ago. She is aging beautifully and looks great in this.
  • This movie is the film debut of Jesse Eisenberg’s son, Banner.  Adorable.
  • Emma Stone was one of the producers.  She and Jesse Eisenberg starred in Zombieland and its sequel back in 2009.
  • Jennifer Grey’s character uses the word “mishegas” when describing Kieran Culkin’s character he plays. I had never heard it before and had to look it up.  It’s a Yiddish word that means craziness or senseless behavior.
  • We get to hear several piano pieces during the film which were composed by Fryderyk Chopin, a Polish composer and piano virtuoso.
  • The British tour guide played by Will Sharpe made an important point when he tells the tour group that it’s not accurate to paint a picture of Jews being led like lambs to the slaughter; many of them joined the resistance movement and tried to fight back in whatever way they could.
  • I love the Jewish tradition of putting a stone on someone’s tombstone to show that they are not forgotten. There’s a scene toward the end of the movie when the two cousins try to put a stone on the stoop of the house where their grandmother lived 85 years ago, but someone tells them not to do it because the elderly woman who currently lives there might trip over it. Jesse Eisenberg explained that he wrote that scene to show that time moves on, irrespective of our strong, flailing attempts to hold on to it. In an interview on the Roger Ebert website, he stated, “You have to live in the present as much as you’re trying to grasp onto the past.”
  • There is some humor to balance some of the heavy, dramatic moments.
  • I love the triple meaning of the title. Kieran Culkin’s character is a real pain the neck, often leaving Jesse Eisenberg’s character grappling with how to handle him. The real pain also has to do with the struggles their ancestors went through during the Holocaust, as well as the current pain that everyone in the tour group deals with in their everyday lives.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:

  •  Sooo many F-bombs.

INTERESTING LINES:

  •  “I didn’t expect to be crying before the tour started.” – Marsha  (Jennifer Grey)
  • “It’s good to be here.” – James  (Will Sharpe)
  • “This will be a tour about pain.” – James  (Will Sharpe)
  • “We numb ourselves to avoid thinking about our impact.” – Marsha  (Jennifer Grey)
  • “Yeah, but isn’t everyone in pain in some way?  I mean, look at what happened to our families. Look at where we came from. I mean, who isn’t…you know, who isn’t wrought?” – David Kaplan  (Jesse Eisenberg)
  • “I just, like, take a pill for my F’n OCD, you know, and I job and I meditate and I got to work in the morning. I, like, come home at the end of the day, and I, like, move forward, you know, because I know that my pain is unexceptional so I don’t feel the need to, like, I don’t know, burden everybody with it, you know?” –  David Kaplan  (Jesse Eisenberg)
  • “I feel shaken, but I guess that’s better than feeling nothing.” –  Eloge  (Kurt Egyiawan)

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Author of 23 books, university professor, mom of 4 awesome sons, movie critic, ice cream lover. Check out her world travels and tips at www.EmptyNestTravelHacker.com

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