A Real Pain
Written and Directed by Jesse Eisenberg
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin
Rated R
Runtime: 1 hour, 30 minutes
In theaters, expanding weekly

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

In June of this year, I traveled to Berlin for the first time in my life. The reason for my visit was to be there for the installation of Stolpersteine outside of the last place my great grandparents and my grandfather lived in Germany. Stolperstein are small metal plaques resembling cobblestones embedded in the sidewalk outside the former homes of those who were killed or displaced by the Shoah. My grandfather, who was a child at the time, fled Berlin in April of 1939 with his parents and some other family, and spent the war years in Shanghai, China. While I am lucky enough where none of my immediate family were placed into concentration camps, my family are part of the Shoah story nonetheless. That trip to Berlin included my other remaining blood family on my father’s side: my father’s younger brothers–my father passed away in 2021 and never made it to Berlin–and my cousin. Drawing on Jesse Eisenberg’s own family history and experience, A Real Pain follows David (Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) as they travel around Poland with a tour group, seeing where their grandmother lived, the Majdanek concentration camp outside Lublin where she was interred, and their grandmother’s former home.

My trip was in the works before I ever heard about A Real Pain, but never has a movie come out that so directly spoke to my experience in such a timely fashion. But I do not think that you need to have such a similar life experience in order to connect with the film. A Real Pain does specifically explore the feeling of generational trauma left behind in the wake of the Shoah, but it also encompasses the kind of sadness and disconnection that only family can provide and the question of how we can continue to live in a world that is almost completely indifferent to the massive amounts of unnecessary suffering happening today. It pursues these questions with a combination of empathy and humor, which also stems from its Jewish Millennial worldview.

A Real Pain takes the form of a buddy road trip comedy, pairing two cousins who were close growing up but have drifted apart: David–described by his cousin as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body that is always running late” due to his anxiety and OCD–while Benji seems like the typical slacker stereotype, nonchalant about most things until he suddenly isn’t. Both men struggle with their mental health, and one component of that is survival guilt that comes from this third post-Shoah generation. It’s something I experience myself. If not for the Nazis, my grandfather likely never would have left Germany, and my father would never have been born. It’s a weird thing to know that if someone did travel back in time to off Hitler in his crib, I’d fade out of existence like the McFly children. Eisenberg’s writing of these characters feels so vivid and so relatable to me. David wrestles with his mental health by repressing this sense of guilt and sadness. He’s the cynical, “grown up” one because he rationalizes away the pain experienced by other people because if you feel everything, you’ll be paralyzed by your sadness. Benji is naturally empathetic but struggles with the hypocrisy of living under late stage capitalism as well as his mood swings. The dissonance of traveling back to his family’s home–a place where our ancestors were rounded up and sent for pain and slaughter–pushes the grief he feels over his grandmother’s recent passing into a more raw and acute place than he is ever able to let on, even to himself. The way the information is revealed about these characters may sometimes come off as clunky or forced–there are a few confessions to their tour group that go beyond anything I’d feel comfortable sharing but that also connects me even more to David as a character.

Speaking for myself as a member of the third generation of Holocaust survivors, there have been many times in my life where I have repressed my own feelings, especially “negative” ones, because I know what some of my relatives went through and my pain is insignificant compared to their suffering. As an adult, I remind myself that hurt isn’t a competition nor does pain need to be justified in any way. Getting picked on in school, or feeling depressed, or anything else that hurts me doesn’t take away from what happened to my family. And I do carry some of that pain forward. It has certainly shaped my worldview, including my deep hatred of fascism and the nightmares I have about being sent to a camp. For all of these reasons, when David and Benji’s tour group does arrive at Majdanek (A Real Pain worked with the museum to film on location), it is one of the few depictions of the Holocaust on screen that didn’t feel overwhelmingly oppressive. Eisenberg just allows the cameras to follow the characters, capturing their reactions mostly in silence. While I do not think I could ever handle visiting a concentration camp in person, it did remind me of when my family visited the Track 17 memorial at Berlin Grunewald station earlier this year. We all walked in silence for a bit, trying to wrap our heads around how this could have ever happened. And then we had a nice lunch at a nearby cafe. It’s too much to process in the moment, but having good schnitzel and beer while making dumb conversation with my family felt like an act of defiance against the long-dead regime. As with seemingly every Jewish holiday, ‘they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.’