"A Real Pain": A Holocaust Film For Our Times

My 5-star review

As someone who opines frequently on the interrelated topics topics of Jews, history, antisemitism, and the millennial generational experience, I found the newly released film A Real Pain to be one of the best movies I’ve seen in years. It combines several topics near and dear to me, while keeping the relationships between interesting characters at the center of the story. Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who also plays one of the main characters, it was filmed in Poland with the collaboration of the Polish Film Institute.

The story begins at JFK airport with the reunion of two Jewish cousins, David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), enroute to Warsaw for a guided Holocaust tour. They are exactly the same age—born 3 weeks apart—and spent a lot of time together in childhood. Their grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz, had recently died and had left them funds in her will for this specific trip. Their plan is to spend the first part of the journey with their tour group, and then break from the group to seek out their grandmother’s childhood home.

The love between David and Benji is palpable, but the differences in their personalities become clear immediately. David is a reserved, straight-edge guy who seems to have it all together—married with a kid, a nice house, and a good job. Benji on the other hand is a faltering millennial: jobless, addicted to pot, and living in his mom’s basement. After arriving at their hotel in Warsaw, they meet the rest of the group: a newly divorced middle-aged Brooklynite (Jennifer Grey), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who later immigrated to the United States and converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan), and an ordinary Jewish boomer couple (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy). Their tour guide is a British non-Jewish history professor (Will Sharpe) whose research interest is Eastern European Jewry.

I found this film highly relatable, for so many reasons. It took me back to my own guided Holocaust tour of Poland just a few years ago. Our tour guide was also a British non-Jewish professor of Holocaust studies, and the group was a motley mix of nationalities and generations. They portray that experience in this film so well. During their train ride from Warsaw to Lublin, Benji laments that they are all riding in first class, implying that they should all feel guilty for doing so:

Boomer guy: I don’t feel guilt. Why would I feel guilt?

Benji: Because our lives are so fucking pampered and privileged, like we’ve completely cut ourselves off from anyone else’s true pain. Like the actual fucking experience of being shoved into a train car and your fucking head bashed in?!

Boomer guy: So what are we supposed to do about it?

Benji: FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGE IT.

Benji then gets up and declares that he’s relocating to the back of the train, to which the Boomer guy replies, “I don’t think you will find much suffering back there either.” Hilarious.

This film does not spend a tremendous amount of time at the actual historical sites, but the ones they do visit are captured well. There are scenes from a walking tour of Warsaw, which includes the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial, followed by a visit to Majdanek concentration camp. They also captured Lublin beautifully, and the description that the tour guide-narrator gives of it (“it was once considered the ‘Jewish Oxford’”) is spot-on. The film does not take us to the major camps that such a tour would always include (namely Treblinka and Auschwitz).

But the film is not about the concentration camps. It does not delve too deeply into the issue of antisemitism (other than what’s already implied in what they’re seeing), but instead focuses on the relationship between the two cousins. Yes, Benji is faltering and annoying, but he’s also charming and extroverted. While David appears to have an enviable life compared to Benji, he’s struggled with long-term mental health issues for which he takes antidepressants. Their grandmother’s loving influence is present when they reminisce about her, but she’s gone.

Three generations removed from their survivor grandmother’s experience, they had the advantages that she didn’t—and do they even appreciate it? We opine on that at the end, when they break from the group to see their grandmother’s childhood house. As someone who has seen my share of Holocaust films, I can usually predict the formula. I knew how this would go before they got there: the owner of the house wouldn’t be home, but the neighbors would be. Yes, there is significance to this.

After remarking on how unremarkable the house itself appears from the outside, David suggests that they find stones to put in front of the door, like one would do at a Jewish gravesite. Benji at first questions this idea (after all, it’s not as if their grandmother was buried there), but David rationalizes it by saying, “it was the last place she was in Poland, the last place any of us were.”

The neighbor then comes out on his balcony to admonish them. After summoning his son to translate, he asks why they placed rocks in front of the door. Benji’s answer: “because our grandma lived here, and she just died.” After an awkward exchange during which the neighbor orders them to remove the stones outside of the door because they might pose a risk to the old lady who lives there, they take the rocks and leave.

Where was the outrage about their grandmother’s house being stolen from her and her family? It doesn’t seem to transmit between the characters present in the scene, because it’s not part of their character arc to feel anger for that reason. It’s for the viewer being taken on this journey to process (or not). The subtlety is genius. Without a doubt, A Real Pain is a Holocaust film for our times.