Pleasures of ‘A Real Pain’

January 1, 2025 JTA

Jesse Eisenberg (left) and Kieran Culkin star in "A Real Pain." (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures via JTA)

By Jackie Hajdenberg

In Jesse Eisenberg’s new film “A Real Pain,” a pair of American Jewish cousins on a heritage tour of Poland sneak back onto a train they already had tickets for, after getting off at the wrong stop.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” says Benji, played by Kieran Culkin. “We shouldn’t have to pay for tickets in Poland. This is our country.”

“No, it’s not,” argues David, played by Eisenberg. “It was our country. They kicked us out because they thought we were cheap.”

The exchange encapsulates the mix of pathos, humor and fast-paced banter that Eisenberg brings to “A Real Pain,” which he wrote and directed.

A native New Yorker who now lives in Bloomington, Indiana, Eisenberg, 41, loosely based the script and characters on a 2008 visit with his now-wife to what was once his great-aunt’s house in Poland.

“I was standing in front of it … expecting to feel something specific and revelatory, and nothing came,” Eisenberg said. “That feeling of emptiness kind of stayed with me for a long time. I was trying to diagnose the emptiness, and I was wondering, ‘Is it because I’m an unfeeling person? Or is it because it’s really just impossible to connect to the past in an easy way, in a kind of external way?’”

Best known for his cerebral, often neurotic turns in “The Social Network,” the FX limited series “Fleishman is in Trouble” and a number of Woody Allen films, Eisenberg has returned to the Holocaust in a number of projects.

In 2013, he wrote and starred in “The Revisionist,” an off-Broadway play about a Polish survivor of the Holocaust.” In 2020, he took part in a staged reading at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage of “The Investigation,” Peter Weiss’ documentary play about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963-1965. That same year, he played Marcel Marceau in “Resistance,” about the famed mime’s role in the French resistance.

“A Real Pain” is about the main characters’ evolving relationship and about the legacy of the Holocaust on American Jews now two generations removed from the genocide.

Benji and David Kaplan set out for Poland while reeling from the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. They join a tour group that includes Marcia (Jennifer Grey), whose marriage recently fell apart, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide.

As the movie’s characters reckon with their personal and collective trauma, the main characters’ differences come into stark relief. On a walk with the group, the cousins briefly imagine what their life would be like if the Holocaust didn’t happen. They would likely still live in Poland.

That’s a scenario with some appeal for Eisenberg, who developed such an affinity for the country while filming there that he decided to seek citizenship, an option often available to descendants of Polish Holocaust survivors. He recently became a citizen and formally marked the occasion at the Polish embassy in Washington, D.C.

Filming in Poland, Eisenberg said, allowed him to experience the generosity of the people living there who worked to tell his family’s story and preserve the memory of the Holocaust, defying his expectations of contemporary Polish cultural attitudes toward the Shoah.

In gaining permission to film at the Majdanek concentration camp, Eisenberg said he benefited from telling a story rooted firmly in the present, even though the camp uniquely lends itself to filmmaking set in the past because it remains in roughly the same condition as when the Nazis operated it.

“A few things were in our favor: Most movies want to shoot in Majdanek, and they want to turn it into 1942 Auschwitz, and they want to have 100 extras in Nazi uniforms running around with guns. We were trying to do the opposite,” Eisenberg said. “What we were trying to do was depict Majdanek as it is now as a tourist site, in an attempt to do the exact thing Majdanek is trying to do itself, which is to try to bring awareness to this, to the horrors that occurred on these grounds.”

He said he had ended up becoming close with a number of young scholars on the staff at the camp memorial. “Our relationship started off with suspicion,” Eisenberg recalled, “and wound up as a beautiful meeting of the minds.”

Eisenberg said he believed that collaborating with others around his age — removed by generations from direct connection with the Holocaust — enabled “A Real Pain” to channel a fresh approach to grappling with the past.

“I’m in a younger generation,” he said. “I have enough distance to go to Poland … and not feel the kind of visceral memories of pain, but going there with an open heart and mind and meeting people who I love and who are contemporaries and friends and who are working to make the world a better place.”

Jackie Hajdenberg writes for the JTA global Jewish news source.