In the first scene of “A Real Pain,” we meet cousins Benji and David Kaplan (Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg) as they are about to depart to Warsaw for a Jewish heritage tour of Poland. The trip is at the bequest of their late Grandma Dory, who was born in Poland and survived the Holocaust due to “a thousand little miracles.” The men remember and admire her as a formidable woman. And Benji mourns the especially close and tough love relationship he had with her.
It’s immediately apparent that these cousins, born three weeks apart and who grew up as brothers, could not be more different. Benji is unmoored and spends his days smoking weed in his parents’ basement in upstate New York. David is married with a child and has a responsible 9-5 job. We know these characters. However, in his directorial debut, Eisenberg doesn’t indulge in Jewish stereotypes. Benji and David are fighting their unique emotional battles and keeping their demons at bay with drugs and psychotropic medication. It doesn’t take long to see that Benji is the family’s black sheep, and David the neurotic good boy.
In Poland, the duo’s fellow travelers include a couple from suburban Ohio tracking down the old haunts of a grandfather who fled to America through Galveston, Texas, just before the Holocaust. Jennifer Grey is Marcia, a chain-smoking divorcee who has recently relocated from Los Angeles to New York and is not sure why she wants to find her roots. A survivor of Rwanda’s genocide and a recent convert to Judaism rounds out the group. The non-Jewish tour guide, James, a British philosemite, offers a firehose of information about Poland before and after World War II that overwhelms and then annoys Benji.
At the start of the trip, David tries to reign in Benji, who has sent himself a package of weed to the hotel in Warsaw. David’s anxiety skyrockets when he realizes what Benji has done, but he eventually relaxes enough to smoke pot on various Warsaw rooftops with his wild-child cousin. Eisenberg, who also wrote the script, has a light touch that keeps these characters from veering into caricatures. When Benji herds the group, including the stalwart James, to strike poses at a 15-foot-high monument to Polish soldiers, David is mortified. Instead of joining in, he ends up taking pictures of everyone with their various smartphones.
After a couple of days in Warsaw, the group sets out to tour Lublin and the surrounding countryside where the Majdanek concentration camp sits on a busy road. James announces to his charges, “This will be a tour about pain. Pain and suffering and loss—but also a tour that celebrates a people, a most resilient people.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Eisenberg, the grandson of Polish Holocaust survivors, described himself as the third generation of a family whose history progressed to a privileged life in America. “I think about being a third-generation survivor [and] there is no good way to experience this. There’s no perfect way to honor and reverse history, because anything you do would be in the context of modern privilege.”
Benji frequently criticizes that modern privilege. When the group travels by first class to Lublin, it dawns on Benji that he is traveling on a train in a country that crammed Jews in cattle cars destined for extermination camps. Benji is overcome and runs away to the second-class car for the rest of the trip. Trauma is a slow, effacing trickle, and by the time it reaches a third generation of survivors, they are very aware that these stories do not directly belong to them. Eisenberg recognizes that for Benji and David, Poland will always be the place where their family was hunted down and murdered. Yet it is also an abstraction that unnecessarily distances them from the Holocaust narrative. As the trip progresses, Benji and David begin to realize how integral the Holocaust is to their identity.
Majdanek is “an eerily short ride from Lublin,” James tells the group. The camp is situated on a main road that thousands of Poles traveled during the war. There was no way not to see the doomed prisoners or ignore the smoke coming out of the chimneys. The Nazis hurriedly abandoned Majdanek, leaving it mostly intact. That historical fact influences Eisenberg’s decision to film the camp scenes in silence.
He captures the actors unrehearsed reactions as James gently explains that the blue streaks on the walls are remnants of the poisonous gas Zyklon B. Without commentary, Eisenberg shows the gas chambers disguised as showers, and the row of ovens where the remains of Jews were burned. The events of the Holocaust lurk just outside each frame and the word “extermination” is never said; Eisenberg has deliberately rooted the film in the present. Yet the visit clearly traumatizes Benji, whose furious crying is a reaction to the camp.
But the trip to Majdanek is not the film’s climax. That happens in a Jewish-themed restaurant, which perfectly embodies Art Spiegelman’s descriptive term “Holokitsch.” A cheesy rendition of “Hava Nagila” is background dinner music, and Benji makes another scene and leaves. At the table, David tries to tamp down his own breakdown, quickly apologizing for “oversharing” about his OCD and Benji’s recent suicide attempt.
At the end of the film, the two cousins leave the group to visit Grandma Dory’s apartment building in a nondescript suburb outside of Lublin. It’s an unremarkable moment until Benji and David place rocks on the stoop of their grandmother’s apartment building, as they would a Jewish headstone. It’s an improvised-turned-solemn gesture cut short when a neighbor scolds them through a translator that the rocks are a tripping hazard. Eisenberg reclaims the moment’s significance when David places his rock from Poland on his stoop in New York City.
The double entendre aside—Benji as the human pain and the existential pain of traveling to Poland explicitly as Jews—the film’s genius rests in how Eisenberg lays out each scene toward expressing a quietly devasting grief. A grief that led Eisenberg, who was so taken by his time in Poland, to bridge the distance between third-generation survivors and the events of the Holocaust: After filming in Poland, he staked a place in his family’s history and acquired Polish citizenship.
“A Real Pain” is currently in theaters. Find showtimes here.
