A Real Pain
There are similarities about every organised tour group but also an X factor. On a perfect tour everyone would stick to the itinerary and get on with each other. In the real world, people get lost, they misplace their passports, they get robbed, they complain about things one could never anticipate, they quickly decide which of their fellow travellers they like and don’t like. Worst of all, there will be one member of the group who stands out by virtue of their loudness, grumpiness or obnoxious behaviour.
In Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, that X factor is Keiran Culkin’s Benji Kaplan – outspoken, foul-mouthed, hypersensitive and unpredictable. He is part of a small contingent of American tourists who are visiting sites in Poland relating to Jewish life and the Holocaust. Benji is travelling and sharing hotel rooms with his cousin, David (Eisenberg), who has his work cut out keeping an eye on his wayward relative.
One assumes that, in life and art, 41-year-old Eisenberg is a neurotic control freak. For this film he is writer, director, lead actor and producer. Almost painfully self-conscious, he plays a fidgety, nervous character torn between a protective love for his cousin and a pre-emptive embarrassment at his uninhibited antics.
Culkin, who you may remember as Roman Roy in Succession, is the perfect foil for Eisenberg’s uptightness. Although every move in the script had been tightly choreographed, Culkin improvised whenever he felt like it, allegedly to good effect. The result is a strange, understated film that touches on some weighty topics, walking a line between comedy and drama in the shadow of the Holocaust. The fact that Culkin is not Jewish hardly seems to matter.
The cousins are making this trip to Poland after receiving a bequest from their late grandmother, Dory, who survived the concentration camps “by a thousand miracles”, as David says repeatedly. They are taking part in a ‘Jewish heritage’ tour, then breaking off by themselves to visit their grandmother’s childhood home in a small town.
The other members of the group have been carefully chosen to represent different aspects of the Jewish experience. James the tour guide (Will Sharp), is not Jewish, but an Oxford-educated specialist in Eastern Europe. Marcia (Jennifer Grey) is a wealthy, middle-aged divorcee, intent on rebuilding her life; Mark and Diane (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy), are a retired couple who describe themselves as “boring”; Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan refugee who survived the genocidal massacres of 1994, escaped to Canada and converted to Judaism.
David is petrified by what the group will make of Benji’s behaviour, which veers between the vulgarity of taking comic selfies in front of the memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto, to an emotional breakdown at the thought of travelling first-class in a train when his forebears were herded into cattle cars. Whatever Benji is thinking, it is almost instantly translated into speech and action, even if means lecturing James on how to conduct his tour.
Benji is the “real pain” in the group, but he also projects a genuine feeling of personal pain. He was especially close to his grandmother and has been hit hard by her death. He feels the grim vibes of the lost Jewish life of Lublin, and the death camp, Majdanek, in a way that seems deeper and more traumatic than any of the others. Gradually the group warms to Benji, gathering around him in a manner that makes David feel like the odd man out. While Benji is a menace, he's also charismatic – a quality David envies.
This brings us back to the relationship between the cousins. Once as close as brothers, they have drifted apart, as David became devoted to a wife, a small son and a job in the tech industry. Benji seems to have done little more than lie around on Grandma’s couch, smoking dope. He plays at being a rebel, but his life is a shapeless mess. Benji imagines himself abandoned by David, who feels guilty as charged. It’s clear, though, that David has grown up while his cousin has never advanced beyond adolescence.
The ambition, and the odd magnetism of this story, is to portray the Kaplans’ tense relationship as not inconsiderable in the face of the Holocaust. We understand that whatever bonds of love and anxiety exist between David and Benji, the roots are to be found in their grandmother’s experience as a survivor, and the Jewish diaspora. They are who they are because of this historical upheaval, with the psychological and emotional turmoil of the present being the legacy of events they never experienced at first hand.
For Eisenberg, a second-generation Jewish American, this is a reality he has absorbed for his entire life. If there seems to be a never-ending, annual supply of movies about the Holocaust it’s because this harvest of death, the destruction of age-old communities and the subsequent relocations, have defined the lives of Jews all over the world. Even non-observant Jews such as David and Benji, can’t help but be affected by their knowledge of what happened to their families.
A good part of this film resembles a documentary account of what remains of Poland’s once mighty Jewish community. The centres of Jewish life in Lublin, a town immortalised by Isaac Bashevis Singer, are now banal, functional buildings. The Jewish cemetery is overgrown and seemingly neglected. Majdanek, where tens of thousands of people were murdered, is a mere two kilometres from the town, a stark, neatly preserved death factory, where the blue stains on the walls testify to the poisonous gas used to eliminate victims.
We see these places through the eyes of the tour group, and more specifically through Benji’s slightly deranged reactions, which have a deep impact on his companions. From out of the stage-managed banality of a heritage tour, an emotional current runs uncomfortably through all the participants. It’s a feeling that will be familiar to Jews all over the world, one that needs to be taken seriously by those who feel outraged by the carnage in Gaza that is dividing entire nations. To understand the agonies of the present, we need to begin with the real pain of the past.
A Real Pain
Written & directed by Jesse Eisenberg
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Daniel Oreskes, Liza Sadovy,
Poland/USA, M, 90 mins