The bathetic scene will be familiar to many Jews who have traced their roots in eastern Europe. You go in search of der heim, your family’s cradle and the fulcrum of its lore, and discover there is nothing left to see. Amid the vacant lots and communist architecture, there is little even to feel. “It’s so unremarkable,” says Benji (Kieran Culkin) when, in “A Real Pain”, he and his cousin David find their grandmother’s house in Poland.
Out in British cinemas now and streaming on Hulu in America, “A Real Pain” is a stealth contender for the Oscars. With a running time of 90 minutes, it shows how a seemingly modest film can encompass grand philosophical themes. Amid the zigzagging mood, it deftly raises moral quandaries at once specific to its characters and universal.
Played by Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer and director), David is a tense New Yorker with a wife, a child and a job peddling advertising banners; or, as his cousin puts it, “selling shit online”. In his Golden Globe-winning turn as Benji, Mr Culkin reprises the manic charisma of his role in “Succession”, but with added pathos. Where David’s feelings are withheld, Benji’s emerge unfiltered. His is the sort of antic life that is fun to watch but punishing inside. “I love him, and I hate him,” David summarises, “and I want to kill him, and I want to be him.”
Their recently deceased grandma, who survived the Holocaust by “a thousand miracles”, left them some money for this pilgrimage to Poland, perhaps in the hope of rekindling the closeness of their youth. In Warsaw they join a Jewish-heritage tour group that includes Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has converted to Judaism out of a sense of solidarity. As they visit monuments to ghettos and uprisings, Benji’s tomfoolery wins everyone over. David sulks.
Since 2002, when Jonathan Safran Foer published “Everything is Illuminated”, a madcap quest into a Jewish family’s past, the third generation’s perspective has been a dominant lens on the Holocaust. This cohort grew up in the shadow of persecution but didn’t experience it; it knows the heart-wrenching stories but doesn’t feature in them. As James (Will Sharpe), the tour guide in “A Real Pain”, notes, the likes of Benji and David find themselves, with unsettling irony, “staying in fancy hotels [and] eating posh food” while pondering their forebears’ agony.
Focusing on the descendants’ angst, rather than the ancestral horror, might seem self-indulgent. But an indirect approach can be more respectful than trying to confront a tragedy head-on. The power of tact was demonstrated recently by “The Zone of Interest”, a film about the domestic life of the commandant of Auschwitz, which declined to cross the barbed wire and enter the concentration camp itself.
In “A Real Pain”, the third-generation ironies are mixed with a reverential awe. When David, Benji and the rest of the group visit Majdanek, another Nazi camp, the wisecracks stop; the trilling Chopin soundtrack falls silent. As the visitors peer into a gas chamber, the camera does not follow their gaze but looks back at their expressions, as if acknowledging that today’s audiences can know this hell only at a remove.
Suffering is always personal. “A Real Pain” is a tale of idiosyncratic characters, set in the wake of a specifically Jewish catastrophe. At the same time it evokes questions with which every thinking person contends. For starters, how do you weigh private woes against large-scale calamities? As war rages in Ukraine and Sudan, for instance, how sad are you entitled to be if a project or relationship fails? In the scheme of things, how much does your own pain really matter?
David and Benji wrestle with this problem in Poland. Memories of their shared childhood, and of mooching around New York, jostle with recollections of their beloved grandmother. Even as they mourn her, and strive to honour her legacy, other worries beset them—not least the awareness that their once-entwined paths have diverged, and that a chasm of incomprehension has opened between them.
Then there is the bedrock challenge of living alongside evil and disaster. “People can’t walk around the world being happy all the time,” Benji rails. Eloge, the Rwandan, is baffled by how “The world seems to carry on like there aren’t a million reasons to be shocked.” This is a conundrum, even for philosophers. One way or another, though, life does carry on—and, after their miniature, tragicomic odyssey, in a film both slight and deep, so do David and Benji. ■
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