There are some films that seem to get it right effortlessly. A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, was made on a budget of $3m. It’s less than 90 minutes long and tells a straightforward story, without any narrative trickery, set over just a few days. Yet it’s completely captivating.
Cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin, Roman Roy in Succession) meet up at the airport, setting off on a week-long “Holocaust tour” in Poland, in memory of their late grandmother Dory, a tough Holocaust survivor. They used to be close but have grown apart and not seen each other for a while.
David – anxious, fast-talking and conscientious, wound up tight physically as well – lives in Brooklyn with his wife and little boy, making his living by selling online advertising. Benji – loose limbed, immediately charming but completely disinhibited about saying what he thinks – is a dropout without a partner, job or home, and distraught about Dory’s passing. So here’s an odd couple on the road together.
Their to and fro is immediately engaging. Benji tells David he’s got some great shit for when they land. David’s aghast. “Wait, you’re not, like, taking weed into Poland, are you?” Benji waves his worries away. “They’re going to arrest two Jews in Poland for a little weed? That’s a good look for the Polish people!” David is petrified as they go through customs. Then, when they check in to their hotel, the receptionist hands them a whiffy, foil-wrapped package Benji had posted out to himself. “Did you not see how nervous I was?” David says. “I thought that was just you,” Benji replies.
They introduce themselves to their fellow tourists. There’s Marcia (Jennifer Grey), the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. There’s a retired couple who announce themselves as boring, originally from Poland but long before the Holocaust – “Mayflower Jews”. And there’s Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a convert to Judaism from Rwanda. “I’m a survivor of the genocide,” he confesses. “Oh, snap!” Benji yells. Seeing the group’s reaction, he gabbles: “Sorry, I meant that in a good way, I’m just interested in people from other places, I’m a fan basically. Carry on, dude!”
The tour leader James (Will Sharpe), an English academic, explains that he’s not Jewish but has always been obsessed with this part of the world and the Jewish experience that he finds so “fascinating and complex, at times tragic but ultimately beautiful”. The group look at him, united in scepticism. So these different backgrounds and expectations are skilfully sketched and played out in the tour that follows as they hit the main sites in Warsaw and Lublin, James cheerily dispensing dates and facts that skate over their significance. “This will be a tour about pain, of course it will, pain and suffering, there’s no getting around that, but I think it’s important that it’s also a tour that celebrates the people. So that’s that one, then,” he concludes at the memorial to the ghetto uprising.
Benji disrupts proceedings throughout, telling James he’s cutting them off from anything real, that it’s grotesque that as Jews they should be travelling first class in Poland. It’s an irresistible performance by Culkin, funny and alarming, as we begin to understand the desperation behind the charm, the impossibility of correlating the pain of his own life with such catastrophic history. “How did this guy come from the survivors of this place?” David asks the others, baffled, admitting he both loves him and hates him.
The production team on A Real Pain is almost entirely Polish, notably the cinematographer Michal Dymek, and the film, although about tourism, feels entirely grounded in its settings. This matters above all when the group visits Majdanek, the most well-preserved camp, just outside Lublin. As the group moves from the bath house to the gas chamber and the ovens, they cease talking, and the camera stops moving. The actors see the camp for real, looking straight at us, silenced.
A Real Pain, graced with a soundtrack of Chopin, beautifully played by the Canadian-Israeli pianist Tzvi Erez, might seem slight when compared with films that recreate the Holocaust directly, such as Son of Saul or The Zone of Interest, or even those grandly dramatising it such as Schindler’s List or Sophie’s Choice. Yet it addresses the question of what we are doing when we go to such places, the way we may be seeking meaning there that is lacking from our own lives, directly, with wonderful intelligence, humour and compassion. A Real Pain is only the second film Jesse Eisenberg has made as writer and director as well as actor, but it’s a masterpiece already.
“A Real Pain” is in cinemas now
[See also: What is the point of We Live in Time?]
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This article appears in the 08 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Power Gap