The very last shot of Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, is identical to its first: a close-up of the tortured, weary face of Benji Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin with a frenetic intensity familiar from his work on Succession. That his sad eyes remain static despite all he has seen is significant, because this is, ostensibly, a Holocaust film, and everyone is supposed to be changed by the end of a Holocaust film.
Popular art about the Holocaust has long been a series of lesson plans, a conduit for catharsis. Most directors, by peering into a gas chamber or the maw of an oven, mean to remind us, as the actor-director Roberto Benigni once obscenely put it, that Life Is Beautiful. This pattern was set only a few years after the Holocaust itself, from the moment “Anne Frank” stood on a Broadway stage in 1955 and redeemed her audience by telling them, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.” Even Schindler’s List, that paradigm of Holocaust movies, is about the moral journey of a non-Jewish savior, Oskar Schindler, who ends the film weeping because “I didn’t do enough!”
This tidy didacticism is perhaps in the nature of narrative and its need for a clean arc—and it’s a good reason the deaths of millions should never have become fodder for blockbusters to begin with. But in A Real Pain, Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film, manages to tell a story about the Holocaust that doesn’t ask all those dead millions to become its supporting cast. In this film, trauma trickles down through the generations, but not in the obvious or pat ways that descendants of survivors have captured it before.
The story plays out straightforwardly as a travelogue that begins and ends in an airport. A pair of cousins, David (played by Eisenberg) and Benji, are on a Jewish-heritage tour of Poland. Their beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who died recently, set money aside in her will for them to visit her birth country. The cousins are only three weeks apart in age, but their differences could not be more pronounced.
Eisenberg has long perfected a kind of “Woody Allen without the baggage” screen persona, and here again he is that neurotic, twitchy Jewish guy. David is settled into middle age, working at a company that creates ad banners for the internet (a job both detestable and banal), with a wife and young child he adores. But the effort he’s making to tamp down his own sadness and pain makes him look pinched and constipated.
His cousin, Benji, tamps nothing down; he is a charmer with a scruffy beard, loose limbs, and an easy though slightly demonic smile. He’s the kind of person who will suddenly hug you for no reason, who speaks too loudly and overshares, who burps unapologetically among strangers. He ships some marijuana to their first hotel stop in Poland. When he and David join a small heritage-tour group upon arriving in Warsaw, everyone immediately falls for him, even as he instigates one awkward situation after another. “You light up a room and then you shit on everything inside of it,” David tells him—an accurate description. Or as one of the tour-group members, a middle-aged divorcée played by a smoky-voiced Jennifer Grey, says about Benji, “He’s funny and charming, under all the mishegas.”
The wonder of this film is its smallness—not to mention its admirable shortness (a swift hour and a half)—despite the large historical and emotional backdrop against which it plays out. These characters want their presence in Poland to mean something, to transform them in some way, but it won’t—it is just a place and, as depicted here, an often drab one. All the trip does is foreground the complexity of David and Benji’s relationship as they shuttle through walking tours and nondescript hotels: Benji’s resentment of and reliance on David’s stability; David’s bafflement and envy over Benji’s allure; and the mental illness that keeps Benji, always on the verge of tears or screaming, stuck in his own mind and his mother’s basement.
If this pilgrimage is meant to offer a comeuppance for these two overgrown Millennial boys, to relativize their own pain as small, this reckoning never arrives.
At the end of the tour, they visit the death camp Majdanek. The camera fixes on their faces as they take in the barracks, the blue-stained walls of the gas chamber, the crematoria. And the score, which is heavy on Chopin, goes silent. As they drive away, Benji is weeping. But there is no mistaking this as a reaction to the camp or thoughts of his grandmother; Majdanek only gave him a little shove. When the cousins leave the tour to find the house where their grandmother grew up, they are headed for an anticlimax. “It’s so unremarkable,” Benji says. To make the moment more solemn, David suggests borrowing from the Jewish ritual of laying a stone on top of a grave, and places one near the threshold. But then a Polish neighbor yells at them that this is a tripping hazard, and they scurry off, pocketing their stones. David will eventually rest his on his stoop in New York City, the home that does have meaning to him.
There is an extremely prosaic quality to their encounters with these places of long-ago Jewish life and death; even as they try to squeeze significance out of the experience, Eisenberg makes us aware of their self-awareness. (“We’re on a fucking Holocaust tour,” Benji scolds David at one point. “If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don’t know what to tell you, man.”) In calling attention to the cliché, Eisenberg is undermining a mini-genre of sorts: books and films about such heritage tours. Earlier this year, Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham starred in the movie Treasure, playing a father and daughter visiting Poland in 1991. Dunham’s character, visibly depressed and recently divorced, is fixated on her father’s experience as a survivor of Auschwitz, so much so that she secretly tattoos his number from the camp on her leg. He is determinedly cut off from his own experience, and thus from her. But during a visit to Auschwitz together, his memories rush in—aided, in a common Holocaust-film trope, by a flashback, this one aural (barking dogs and screeching trains)—and his emotional opening-up begins.
The urtext of such journey stories is probably Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. In the 2005 film adaptation of the novel, a similar transformation occurs at the site of a Jewish massacre: sepia-toned flashbacks of shots fired and piles of bodies. And the eyes of Elijah Wood, playing Foer in the film with a determined blankness, fill with tears behind his coke-bottle glasses.
Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, once diagnosed this as holo-kitsch, and it now seems to have passed on to a third generation. These grandchildren want to touch the trauma and have some of its meaning rub off. But Eisenberg resists this. He chooses to set the climactic scene of A Real Pain not in a gas chamber but in a Jewish-themed restaurant in Lublin, with a piano player’s treacly rendition of “Hava Nagila” tinkling in the background. The tour group is sitting around a table having dinner and reminiscing about their forebears’ resilience, not their suffering.
Once again, Benji makes a scene. And after he storms off, managing to concern and confuse everyone, David breaks down. He knows he’s “oversharing,” but he can’t help it. His cousin’s troubling behavior is much worse than we’ve already seen, and culminated in a crisis after their grandmother died. She alone was capable of breaking through to Benji by putting his anguish in perspective; she even slapped him once, as if to shock him awake.
Driving Benji’s oversensitivity and instability is a desperate, self-involved desire to feel. But this doesn’t make him an inheritor of trauma. It just exposes his distance from it—the trip’s only real revelation being his own fragility. David, processing aloud at the dinner, himself close to tears, can’t believe the dissonance, all the vulnerability in his generation despite their family’s history: “How did this guy come from the survivors of this place?”
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