By Yechiel Amar, Staff Writer
Going into Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, I had no idea what effect this movie would have on me, though I had some presumptions.
The movie follows two cousins, the neurotic David (Jesse Eisenberg), and free-spirited Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a Holocaust tour in Poland, to see where their recently-deceased grandmother grew up.
As a Jew who bears certain commonalities with both lead characters and who has traveled to Poland, I knew I would have no trouble connecting this film. I went in expecting little more than the usual tropes and cliches that are used in movies dealing with this subject matter. Yet when the credits began to roll, I found myself floored by a film unlike anything of its type I had experienced before.
The movie, to put it simply, is about pain. Not just the pain of the Holocaust, but the individual pain each person carries inside and attempts to cope with on a daily basis. The pain we carry for and receive from others, and pass on ourselves. How much of Jewish life and society today is defined by our pain and suffering? Does pain make you better or worse? Should we laud pain, mourn it, or deny it? A chord was struck within me when David said “My pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to burden everyone with it,” and I believe others will feel the same.
Like pain, the movie is shot starkly, naked save for the classical compositions of Frédéric Chopin accompanying the viewer and the cousins on this journey. As the audience travels from Warsaw to Lublin, there are no attempts, as other media of this type often does, to forcibly prod and guilt –through music and performance – an emotional reaction from viewers. In fact, in a scene on a train in which Benji experiences a bout of survivor’s guilt that they have first-class seats while those before them were in cattle cars, the film examines and comments on the guilt but never foists it upon the viewer. Another scene examines the too-often effect of being drowned in facts and statistics, choking out any emotional connection one might achieve with the personal horror of what occurred. Simply put, this film is not your typical “Holocaust movie.”
The soul of the movie is the relationship between the two cousins. A loving one but frayed for reasons unknown, each carries his own feelings and resentments about the other and the lives they lead. In the highly emotionally volatile environment of a Holocaust tour, their struggle to reconcile their disparate feelings toward each other is heightened. David, responsible for a job and a family, cannot reconcile his love for Benji with Benji’s carefree, aimless and seemingly erratic nature. Benji, on the other hand, carries anger at David’s closed off self-conscious nature, saying to him, “You used to feel things, man!” It is this dynamic that fills the film with energy, both darkly comedic and incredibly tragic. Yet, as with the generational pain, so too this familial pain has no easy answer, no simple solution. Rather than a perfect catharsis, the film opts for the messiness of truth instead.
Outside of the cousins, the film is filled with well-acted performances of other people on the tour, each character bringing to light another archetype. There is divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey) who, feeling caught in materialistic society, seeks a sense of perspective. There is Eloge the convert (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, come to connect to his new people’s heritage. There is an older couple, Mark and Diane (Daniel Oreskes & Liza Sadovy), who have heritage in Poland but are mostly concerned with enjoying the tour. And leading them all is an affable British gentile tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), who makes up for his lack of personal connection with a bevy of facts and information concerning Jewish Poland and the Holocaust. The dynamics between all the characters are subtle until they’re not, when they begin to add their own layers of depth to the movie outside of the cousins’ drama.
The film reaches a crescendo when the group visits the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. Here the music stops leaving the viewer – along with the tour group – to experience the horror of the camp alone, the guide interjecting only to announce what it is they are seeing. It is one of the most deeply affecting parts of the film, simply presenting the now-inert sites of the unimaginable, with all the context and meaning behind them rushing towards you. It transported me back to my own visit to Majdanek, and yet even if I hadn’t been there, I doubt the film would have made me feel any less affected.
So what did I come away with from A Real Pain? Did I reach an apotheosis, come to some great realization and synthesis of who I am and my relation to those who came before me? Did this movie erase my pain? No, because that’s not how pain works. It can get lighter or heavier, and one day it might disappear, but you have to carry it with you until it’s gone. And of course, you can share it, willingly or unwillingly, for better or worse. Perhaps that’s what I took away from this film, a greater understanding of humanity. For it is so universal that in moments of pain is when we are most human.
Photo Caption: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC
Photo Credit: J. Amill Santiago / Unsplash