(RNS) — After arriving in Poland for a weeklong Holocaust “roots” tour, Benji, one of two Jewish American cousins whose trip is depicted in the new movie “A Real Pain,” has a meltdown in the first-class section of the Warsaw-Lublin train. Benji (Kieran Culkan) wrestles with an eerie sense that as he walks in the footsteps of Jews put on cattle cars on the way to concentration camps, his privilege obscures the real horror of the Shoah.
It’s a feeling many American Jews experience when they encounter Holocaust sites: the sense that their existence is an unintended consequence of this catastrophe and to return means to explore the violent rupture that destroyed the world that could have been. Benji’s cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg) watches this outburst and is horrified. But Benji is insistent: If a Holocaust tour isn’t the time to grieve, then when is?
“A Real Pain,” about the cousins’ trip to Poland to honor their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, after her death, builds on a host of earlier movies about the Holocaust, adding an apt contemporary twist: What does the Shoah mean now that most survivors are no longer with us? How does it keep playing out for their descendants? What should you do with your life when it’s the result of a “miracle of a thousand miracles”?
Benji and David are also reuniting after having drifted apart. David, a familiar Eisenberg embodiment, is the stereotype of an anxious Jewish man: overbearing, wound up, neurotically checking his phone for messages from his work in digital advertising or from his wife, Priya, about his young child, Abe. Benji, his charismatic though volatile cousin, is looking not only to make sense of his grandmother’s death but to move forward after years of aimlessly searching for direction.
David cringes at the others on the tour. Benji, swearing and burping, rumbles through Poland with little regard for anyone else, often rudely driving the cousins’ fellow tourists apart and aggravating Eloge, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism after settling in Canada after the war.
Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Kieran Culkin in “A Real Pain.” (Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved.)
Despite his flaws, Benji’s capacity for affection is heartwarming, especially in his relationship to David; in often hilarious moments, he brings out the best in his tightly wrapped cousin. But as this tenderness leads to vulnerability, Benji crumbles and his dysfunction takes center stage. He’s looking for real pain — a way to genuinely connect with something of this past to wake him out of his stupor. But on a trip this short, his inhibitions hold him back.
Their story fits within the wider phenomenon of Holocaust tourism and the contested, challenged terrain of Holocaust memory. Every year thousands of Jews go to Poland, some to connect the devastation of the Shoah with the need for a Jewish state, others looking to revive and celebrate a past that was devastated in the Holocaust.
In shot after shot, the film captures the quiet beauty of the Polish landscape that contrasts with sites of such immense suffering — the camp at Auschwitz next to the bustling city of Oświęcim; Treblinka in the middle of a lush forest. It evoked in me (Zev) my grandfather’s harrowing tale of survival in Lithuania, and I grappled with what it means to inherit the privilege of American identity as an accident of this history.
In a sequence in modern-day Lublin, the cousins’ guide points out the buildings that used to house a synagogue, a bakery, a cobbler and a fishmonger. All that has either been erased (as in Anna’s hometown of Kołobrzeg, where the old synagogue building was repurposed as a small candy factory) or turned into a Disney-fied Jewish district where few Jews actually reside (like in the Kazimierz district of Krakow.)
This evokes the type of memorializing that’s valued by the Polish state. It exploits both the camp sites and a few well-known cultural sites, but values sites of Jewish flourishing only as far as they can be exploited for tourism, not as ways of preserving the memory of earlier Jewish life.
Actors Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Kieran Culkin in “A Real Pain.” (Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved.)
The cousins locate their grandmother’s house in Krasnystaw, a small town southeast of Lublin, and, as instructed by a tour guide earlier at the Jewish cemetery in Lublin, put two pebbles on her former stoop. This begins the only meaningful interaction between the cousins and Poles. A middle-aged man, standing on a balcony of a neighboring house, communicating with the help of his teenage son, tells David and Benji to remove the pebbles because they might be a hazard for the older woman who lives there now.
When the cousins explain it’s a Jewish custom, the man remains unmoved, irritably waving them off, representing a real fear among Poles that Jewish visitors intend to reclaim their ancestors’ properties — mienie pożydowskie, “‘post-Jewish’ property.”
But the film also too often overlooks the reality of modern-day Poland, including its antisemitism. The districts around train stations in large cities are rife with antisemitic slogans and graffiti, which the movie characters could well have seen through the train windows. Instead, we’re offered a very sanitized portrayal aided, no doubt, by the lack of interaction of the characters with Polish people (Benji comments on this, yet it remains unresolved).
The film skirts these uncomfortable political questions by meditating on what it means to be a descendant of Holocaust survivors — that “miracle of a thousand miracles.” How does one live up to the enormity of that legacy?
David holds himself together by embracing convention — the wife, kids and apartment, modeling the perfect American life. Benji is unable to uphold that ruse; he crumbles under the pressure and can’t make sense of where his pain fits in the scheme of his life. He’s displaced everywhere, no matter where he goes.
Jesse Eisenberg, right, and Kieran Culkin in “A Real Pain.” (Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved.)
In the end, “A Real Pain” is a commendable effort to capture that longing, even as it falls short, particularly in its failure to grapple more honestly with the antisemitism that destroyed Jewish Europe. It also ignores the people still there, building it back up, just as it fails to acknowledge the rich Jewish life that preceded the war, as the film version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” did well.
To the film’s credit, we eventually see how the trip may be a new beginning for the cousins. David brings home the very pebble he tried (and failed) to leave at his grandmother’s old home, placing it on his stoop in New York; Benji returns and waits at the airport, seemingly still holding out hope of finding his direction.
(Anna Piela, an American Baptist Churches USA minister, is a visiting scholar of religious studies and gender at Northwestern University and the author of “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” Zev Mishell is a writer currently studying at Harvard Divinity School. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)
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