“A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore film as a director now streaming on Hulu, is a beautifully cyclical film. It starts and ends at the airport, a transitional space that blankets the protagonists’ journey to and from Poland, where their grandmother survived the horrors of the Holocaust.
Or rather, the movie starts with one character, Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, at the airport, calmly people-watching while his cousin, David, played by Eisenberg, is frantically making his way to the airport to get there in the requisite three hours before the flight. Benji sits leisurely as Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 plays, a portrait of humanity in transit unfolding before him, as David runs from his home and sits impatiently in a taxi, calling and calling and calling Benji to make sure he’s aware of the traffic and on his way.
For a non-Jewish viewer, David’s frenetic pre-flight energy may feel familiar, even viscerally so, but I am willing to bet that for a lot of Jewish viewers, David’s pre-flight panic feels more than just familiar — it feels, in some unexplainable way, Jewish. There is an embedded trauma in our people that has made this experience of transit feel weighty and dangerous.
“A Real Pain” is full of explicitly Jewish moments. It follows a group of Jewish people visiting Poland to better understand the trauma of the Holocaust, and for some, the trauma of a loved one they knew so personally — like David and Benji’s grandmother, Dory, and fellow tour goer Marcia, played by the incredible Jennifer Grey, whose mother is a survivor. Another tourist is Eloge, a Jewish convert and survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who talks about his love for Shabbat.
But the film is also Jewish in special, more ephemeral ways. It is about how a legacy of pain impacts the two men at the tale’s center in very different ways. David is anxious, rigid and regimented; his life, from the outside, looks picture-perfect, just right. He has a child (played by Eisenberg’s own kid) as well as a wife and stable job. Benji lives the life of the wandering Jew, unmoored and in transit. He is incredibly charming — every person he meets in this movie, from Will Sharpe’s James, their non-Jewish trip guide, to the TSA agent at the airport are won over by the way he is so honest and in the moment, in direct contrast with David’s reservedness and fear. One could argue that they both are filled with the same undercurrent of pain, but in Benji, it becomes explosive and all-consuming, as big as his joy can be, while David has found ways to repress it, believing his pain is unremarkable, unworthy of notice.
There is a frequently uttered adage among survivors: their family is their revenge against the Nazis. But what does it mean to be born into such a legacy? What weight does being the child or the grandchild of survivors, the revenge, put on one’s shoulders?
Personally, I’ve felt the chasm of despair that Benji seems to be at the constant precipice of, but Eisenberg’s portrayal of David is what gets me more than anything. I deeply feel the way he tamps down his feelings, the echoes of the fear that inform his every move, worried about acting in the bounds of legality and propriety. If he had been alive when his grandmother was, one wrong move might have meant total inhalation. The legacy of surviving, and thriving in the way prescribed by the society he lives in, rests heavily on him.
I should say that the movie is also profoundly funny. Last year, in an interview with Kveller, Eisenberg said that humor was the currency in his Jewish-American family. Of course, there is a legacy of Jewish American humor, from the Marx Brothers to Mel Brooks to Adam Sandler; we’ve used it to paint our history and identity into the fabric of this country. The humor of “A Real Pain” feels effortless but also cerebral — there is an art to making jokes about the Holocaust that are just the right amount of irreverent. It’s hard to think of a non-Jewish creator writing a movie full of Holocaust humor, and it’s perhaps why authentic representation feels so much more important behind the scenes (on top of directing and starring, Eisenberg also wrote the screenplay). It allows for a non-Jewish actor like Kulkin to feel perfectly cast — the naturally charming actor embodies Benji so well.
The movie is Eisenberg’s love letter to Poland, even if there are few Polish-speaking characters here. The film paints the country as pastoral, colorful, inviting, full of history and light and life. We see the monuments in Warsaw, the colorful buildings in Lublin. There are postcard-like stills and journeys through a verdant landscape, all set to the country’s most famous composer, Chopin, whose music Eisenberg often listened to while he wrote. You won’t see undercurrents of antisemitism in present-day Poland here — David and Benji’s one encounter with the locals is funny and strangely sweet. It is perhaps not everyone’s experience of Poland, but it’s clear this is a country Eisenberg loves and cares for, and of which he is even an honorary citizen, and it is quite an enchanting experience to see it through his eyes.
There is a moment in the movie where Benji and David discuss what their life could have been if the war hadn’t sent their family in the direction of a secular life in America. David talks about walking past a Haredi man and thinking, “There but for the grace of no God go I.” It makes sense that antisemitism doesn’t really touch the life of these two very secular New York Jews. It makes sense that the echoes of it aren’t one they find in this intimate trip to Poland. “A Real Pain” is a quietly ambitious film, one that manages a lot of big feats elegantly — but one that doesn’t bite off more than it can chew. It is because it clings to the specificities Eisenberg knows well that makes the movie feel universal.
As a granddaughter of survivors, I approach Holocaust movies with a certain embedded distrust. I have grown weary of their lessons, their moralism. This movie doesn’t devolve into didactic statements that sometimes feel mealy-mouthed. There are no “never agains” or “we must remembers.” There are no skeletal survivor flashbacks. There are no survivors at all, in fact — only their ghosts and the ghosts of the ones who didn’t survive.
That doesn’t mean that “A Real Pain” doesn’t let you feel the weight of the Holocaust and its history. But it does it in a quiet way that feels more profound to me than many of the other Holocaust films I’ve seen. We experience it as James points at different sites in Lublin and calls out the Jewish landmark they used to be; in the overgrown Jewish cemetery; in Majdanek, the most well-preserved concentration and death camps the Nazis erected, which the film shows mostly in silence.
The film gives space for that experience of quiet reverence, but doesn’t demand anything of us, doesn’t tell us what we should do with that feeling except perhaps to wonder. There are many shots in this movie of Benji and David, in silent companionship, examining what is before them, and those moments also give the viewer the same time and space to take it in.
What I love most of all about “A Real Pain” is that its main concern is in being a great movie, and like all great movies, it takes us on a journey. Like David and Benji, the viewer comes out of the journey not necessarily changed, but richer in something: a better understanding of our pain, of one another, or just in the beauty of a well-made work of art.
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