[COLUMN] Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain is a New Kind of Holocaust Movie | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for A Real Pain, which is on PVOD right now and is very good. Eisenberg is great, Culkin is phenomenal.

A study published in January 2024 observed that the number of living survivors of the Holocaust had declined by half since the turn of the millennium, with most of the remaining 272,000 survivors having lived through that historical trauma as children. As was always inevitable, the Holocaust is fading from living memory, disappearing into the fog of history.

This has long been a source of cultural anxiety. The fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust during the 1990s prompted a wave of attempts to memorialize and preserve the experience of the Holocaust, whether through films like Schindler’s List and Life of Beautiful or through the recorded statements of survivors given to organizations like the Shoah Foundation. Still, as the modern generation gets further and further from that great tragedy, the Holocaust risks becoming an abstraction.

This anxiety has long been a preoccupation for actor, writer and director Jesse Eisenberg. Over a decade ago, Eisenberg’s second stage play, The Revisionist, told the story of a young writer visiting his second-cousin, a survivor of the Holocaust. Eisenberg had been working on the play for years before it was eventually staged, prompted by his own experiences visiting his own second-cousin in Eastern Europe in 2007. On top of writing the play, Eisenberg also played the younger character.

“For 20 years, I have struggled with — and written about — the following problem: How do I reconcile my modern daily challenges with my ancestors’ historical trauma?” Eisenberg explains of his repeated attempts to navigate the complexity of the memory of the Holocaust. “That is, how could I possibly feel bad about my little life when I come from survivors of global horrors? And the more I struggled with this question, the more I punished myself for even asking it.”

Eisenberg’s latest feature film, A Real Pain, was prompted by the actor seeing an online advertisement for “Auschwitz Tours (With Lunch)” while browsing the internet. “[That] seemed like something to write about,” Eisenberg admitted. “The implications are that we want, as a modern middle-class culture, to go and experience the trauma of our ancestors but at the same time we don’t want to forgo any of our material creature-comfort pleasures.” 

A Real Pain tells the story of two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who journey to Poland in the wake of the death of their beloved “Grandma Dory”, a Holocaust survivor based on Eisenberg’s late, paternal great-aunt Doris. David and Benji were inseparable as kids – “joined at the hip” – but have drifted apart. David got married and had a kid. Benji is listless, finding himself in “a real shit place, recently.” Concerned, David organizes the trip as part of an attempt to reconnect.

A Real Pain is a fascinating movie, in part because it challenges the preconceived notions of what “a Holocaust movie” can be. “I just have a very kind of, let's say—what's the word—touchy reaction to the way the Holocaust is presented in films,” Eisenberg acknowledges. “It's such an easy thing to evoke sympathy with a Holocaust setting that I feel, almost from a creative perspective, it's so exploitative when they overdo it.”

Perhaps Eisenberg has a point. There is something vaguely distasteful in the way that the Holocaust has become a touchstone for a certain kind of self-serious and self-important awards-season film, as demonstrated by awards contenders like The Reader, The Book Thief and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. As the horrors of those events slip out of the collective consciousness, it is perhaps vulgar to reduce the attempted genocide to a set of prestige signifiers and tropes.

This is perhaps why so many of the more interesting and compelling examples of the recent takes on the Holocaust have been built around the idea of not looking at the pain and the suffering. László Nemes' Son of Saul is set at Auschwitz, but keeps its camera focused tightly on Saul Ausländer's (Géza Röhrig) face, because there is perhaps the only way to get through it. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest never peers over the wall that separates the Höss family home from the Auschwitz workcamp.

These movies employ the same conceptual hook to a different thematic end. In Son of Saul, the only way to get through the horror is not to look at it. In The Zone of Interest, the choice not to see the suffering of others allows one to enjoy the spoils that come from active or passive participation in the horrors. In A Real Pain, Eisenberg uses the sheer unimaginable scale and horror of the Holocaust as a metaphor for human beings’ larger inability to navigate pain and perhaps even empathy.

To the tour group in A Real Pain, the Holocaust is an abstraction. “I’m not myself Jewish, but I’m completely obsessed with this whole part of the world – and in particular the Jewish experience, which I find to be fascinating and complex and at times tragic, but ultimately beautiful,” explains James (Will Sharpe), the tour guide, by way of introduction. James is “a scholar of Eastern European studies at Oxford.” His understanding of the horror cannot be anything but academic.

The tour group has a set of very different relationships to the Holocaust. Marcia (Jennifer Grey) is on the trip to try to understand her deceased mother. “My mother survived the camps, and she never talked about it – ever,” she explains. Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) is a Rwandan convert to Judaism. “To answer the inevitable question that you might be thinking,” he offers in introducing himself to the group, “I am a survivor of the Genocide.” Benji instinctively reacts with “snap!”

One of the central tensions threaded through A Real Pain is the question of how one can understand such unimaginable pain on such an incredible scale, and how one can do that without being either detached or self-involved. Benji freaks out at the luxury of the tour. “You’re staying in fancy hotels, eating posh food, and at the same time you’re looking back at the horrors of your family’s history,” James admits. “It can conjure up feelings of discomfort and discordance and – dare I say it – guilt.”

There is an inherent paradox at play. This is a vacation, but it is also a meditation on one of the great tragedies of human history. As James lays out their itinerary, he casually observes that “the big hitter is the Grodzka Gate.” At one point, Benji coaxes the group into striking poses with a memorial statue. “Doesn’t that sound disrespectful?” David asks. Benji doesn’t care. Instead, playacting for the camera, Benji asks, “Is it funny?” It is difficult to reconcile the contradictions at play.

However, A Real Pain is most interesting in its examination of how these acknowledgements of trauma and pain are carefully structured and contained. Benji repeatedly talks about how David has become more repressed and buttoned up since their childhood, and the implication is that this is why David has been able to secure a more stable life than Benji. “You used to feel everything,” Benji reminds David, wistfully. David suggests that his ability to turn that feeling off is a source of strength.

Indeed, as Benji coaxes the group through discussions of empathy and pain, David is quite evidently uncomfortable. He wonders whether this is the time and the place for a conversation about such things. “Yo, Dave, we’re on a fucking Holocaust tour,” Benji replies. “If now’s not the time and place to grieve – to open up – I don’t know what to tell you, man.” David feels too little, Benji feels too much. Benji is fun, charismatic, and engaging. However, he’s also manic, brash, impulsive and unreliable. He is a lot, in a way alternatingly refreshing and infuriating.

Over dinner with the group, David confesses the real reason that he is trying to reconnect with Benji. Benji recently tried to take his own life. However, while this is a clear effort to help Benji, it’s also clear that David has imposed a clear boundary on his empathy. The tour is a contained space, and even within that David struggles to directly talk about the actual, real and meaningful pain that both he and Benji are feeling, because he feels that his own pain is “unexceptional.”

As such, A Real Pain becomes a story about how human beings compartmentalize empathy and pain, and the challenges that this presents both in acknowledging the historical trauma of an event like the Holocaust and something more deeply personal like Benji’s mental health issues and David’s concern over his cousin’s wellbeing. The abstracting of that pain is numbing, placing everything in its shadow.

Contemplating the enormity of the Holocaust, David argues that he and Benji are the product of miracles upon miracles upon miracles that got them to the lives they currently lead. “How did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?” David wonders, struggling to find a way to articulate the scale of historical suffering and a more immediate intimate sort of agony, without minimizing either. It’s an incredibly deft and nuanced approach.

There is perhaps another unarticulated pain lurking beneath the surface of A Real Pain. Eisenberg wrote the film “during the pandemic.” The pandemic was a tough time, particularly for older people, especially Holocaust survivors. 5,300 Holocaust survivors died in 2020, including 900 who died of COVID in Israel. Isabella Greenberg, a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of Holocaust survivors, acknowledged seeing “a spike of psychoses and cognitive decline among her patients.”

The pandemic is never mentioned in A Real Pain. Grandma Dory is implied to have died of old age, “getting a little senile.” Still, there is that same sense of numbness permeating A Real Pain, that feeling of unarticulated grief. It is in some ways an expression of what Abby Ellin described as “this liminal space, this Great Global Pause” of the pandemic. There is a sense that pop culture is struggling to articulate and express the strangeness and the tragedy of what happened.

It’s interesting that Benji seems to spend so much of the movie in liminal spaces – in hotels, on trains, on buses. He is introduced already waiting for David at the airport because “they open the airport super early - you can just hang out.” When David returns home to his family at the end of the movie after they fly home, Benji just waits around the airport. The movie is bookended by shots of Benji, sitting in the airport, stuck between places.

A Real Pain is a fascinating and fresh take on the familiar Hollywood cliché of the Holocaust movie, a film less about the academic reality of the horror or the familiar tropes of the genre, and more about the complicated relationship that human beings have to pain and empathy as ideas. It’s a real wonder.