A respectful Holocaust film that contains jokes: Jesse Eisenberg’s ‘A Real Pain’
'The first generation is dying out yet art is still being created in relation to the Holocaust' says reviewer Darren Richman
I have been to Auschwitz three times and attended three Bob Dylan concerts. In both cases, I swear each time will be the last. The words “never again” have rarely felt more apposite.
On my last trip to Poland, in August 2023, I visited the apartment building where my grandfather, Zigi Shipper, grew up. That is, until history and Hitler had other ideas and he would end up in the Lodz Ghetto then Auschwitz. Zigi had passed away in January of the same year and it seemed like the visit was overdue, not least because of those three earlier trips to the concentration camp he endured in his teens. He wasn’t defined by his trauma and nor would my memory of him be. I wanted to see where he grew up with, as he would proudly inform us, the family’s very own toilet.
This week sees the release of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain starring the filmmaker and Kieran Culkin, a comedy drama about cousins travelling to Poland in the aftermath of the death of their beloved Holocaust surviving grandparent. This is a desperate attempt to see their grandmother’s childhood home and, ideally, feel something. It is a film about the burden of history and generational trauma told from the perspective of the third generation, something I have not seen on screen before. I feel grateful the film exists, something I was able to tell Eisenberg when I interviewed him in a Soho hotel in October.
A Real Pain is a film that consistently subverts expectations. It opens with the neurotic, uptight David (Eisenberg) calling slovenly stoner Benji (Culkin) to make sure he’s not late for the airport but we soon learn Benji has been there for hours.
When the pair miss their stop and the rest of the tour group alight a train later in the film, there is no great crisis since the other tourists simply wait for them. The Polish people in the film are not antisemitic.
And perhaps the greatest upending of expectations is the simple fact that this is a respectful film involving the Holocaust that contains jokes.
Indeed. when the group arrives at Majdanek concentration camp, in a scene shot on location, the tour guide played by Will Sharpe tells the viewers as much as the characters, “I think you’ll find, for better or for worse, this place speaks for itself.” What follows plays out not like comedy or drama but simply what it is like to be a tourist in such a spot. I know this for a fact since I have stood hugging my sister in the same location as she sobbed, “This could have been grandpa.”
Eisenberg has long been one of Hollywood’s most thoughtful, self-deprecating actors and seems equally comfortable playing supervillains as disparate as Lex Luthor and Mark Zuckerberg. His early career was marked by low-key wonders like Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland. In 2022, he played the titular role in Fleishman is in Trouble, one of the great miniseries of the decade thus far. With A Real Pain, though, he has come of age as a writer-director with his sophomoric effort.
The filmmaker’s own paternal great-aunt survived the camps and was the model for the cousins’ grandmother in A Real Pain. Eisenberg would visit his relative on a weekly basis for years and she grounded him with her tales of survival while he experienced the strangeness of burgeoning fame. The late grandmother in the film is not deified but humanised and thus Benj speaks of being struck by their survivor heroine. Six million is a significant number but we would do well to also remember the massive impact on those who survived such an ordeal and their descendants. My own grandfather was a hero but he was not a pleasure to be stuck in traffic with.
It feels significant that the first generation is dying out yet art is still being created in relation to the Holocaust. It feels appropriate for someone of Eisenberg’s generation to make a film that does not depict terrifying Nazis or emaciated victims but does not lose sight of the effect those things have trickling down the decades.
Ultimately A Real Pain asks whether the manageable, treatable pain of its protagonists has worth when contrasted with the epochal tragedy their ancestor lived through. What pain is valid? Eisenberg does not offer all the answers but, in keeping with the best traditions of Judaism stretching back thousands of years, he asks the pertinent questions.
‘A Real Pain’ is in UK cinemas from Friday 10th January.
- Darren Richman is a journalist
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