Review of A Real Pain

Unsatisfactory film about two American youngish men on a trip to Poland to honour the memory of their grandmother. They're first cousins and their relationship is complex - a bit angry, a bit adulatory. But the film has little nuance in its treatment of the relationship between American Jews and their European ancestry. There's a lachrymose scene in which the tour group visits a death camp and it makes them all speechless, but the film has got nothing to say about this apart from the obvious.

Oddly this covers the same territory as "Everything is Illuminated" which is a much better film (but which I don't seem to have reviewed).

Even more oddly there's a scene in this film where the two Americans go up on to the roof of their hotel to smoke dope, and we see them going up the hotel staircase. When I was in Warsaw, on a work trip, there was a fire alarm and I had to go down the hotel stairs, from the 12th floor. The stairs in my hotel looked a lot like the stairs in theirs.

Watched on a USB stick, via informal download.