*Editor’s Note: Excerpts of this review could be perceived as expressions of personal views on matters of current public debate and consideration. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Irish Film Critic.
Mismatched cousins reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother, but their old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
I do not necessarily think there should never be another film covering the Holocaust, but if you are going to produce one, you better make it unforgettable. Jonathan Glazer made the most original and arguably the best film on the subject with “The Zone of Interest.” In his movie, the Nazi commander Rudolf Höss oversees Auschwitz while residing with his family next to the death camp. Höss does everything he can to maintain the facade of an idyllic existence while thousands are killed just over the family’s fence. The film’s parallels with Israel’s approach to its settler-colonial rule are undeniable. And now, with Israel openly committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians, it is perplexing why the Palestinians rarely get any recognition or representation in mainstream media and film.
Jesse Eisenberg has stated in several interviews that he is a devout believer in the Zionist project and that someday, he plans to apply for Israeli citizenship. Upon recently learning this, I went into “A Real Pain” with my proverbial guns loaded. He wrote, directed, and starred in this film, which centers on two mismatched cousins, played by himself and Kieran Culkin, embarking on a Holocaust tour around Poland. They also visit their recently departed grandmother’s home in a small village which she was displaced from during the Holocaust. Eisenberg intentionally avoided any recent events in Palestine, Sudan, or Congo, instead he references the Rwandan genocide that took place in 1994. One of the film’s characters is a Rwandan refugee who converted to Judaism and thus felt inclined to join the tour. The character claims he felt a connection to Judaism but mainly seems to enjoy the cultural aspects, like sitting at home for Shabbat. Other characters include a woman whose guilt compelled her to take the tour and an older Jewish couple who seem more curious than guilt-ridden. The tour guide is played by Will Sharpe, who is not Jewish but a scholar of the events and Eastern European history.
Eisenberg’s character, David, is an accomplished digital advertising salesman who lives in a fancy Park Slope brownstone with his wife and child. He struggles with OCD, and his success is quite the opposite of his depressed cousin Benji (Culkin). Benji lives in his mother’s basement in Binghamton and occasionally works for a friend on construction projects. Benji is charismatic and quite blunt with anyone he meets. While David, on the other hand, is quiet and rarely speaks out when he wants to. And while David is very controlling and full of anxiety, he is constantly tardy to all of the tour’s activities. These two being at odds with their respective lives and personalities should have made for entertaining or cathartic conversations, but there were only a handful of funny or insightful moments between them. As usual, Eisenberg is playing himself while Culkin’s performance is expectedly magnetic. Yet his magnetism is not enough to save “A Real Pain” from an underwhelming experience with a script that adds nothing new to the Holocaust genre. Plus, we have yet to see a film that shows the whole scope of the Holocaust’s victims, which included Roma people, disabled people, Queer people, communists, and artists.
Eisenberg could have made a remarkable film by drawing comparisons between his grandmother’s displacement and her time in concentration camps with the Nakba Massacre, which displaced and expelled over 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 and ultimately led to over a million refugees being forcibly placed in the open air prison within the Gaza Strip. “A Real Pain” feels like a relic from the Obama-era film, where characters are reckoning with past traumas while not offering material solutions for a way forward. And here, Eisenberg refused or failed to make a more universally moving statement on countries committing unspeakable atrocities in the name of religion or perceived superiority – which is a real shame.
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