A Real Pain

A beautifully written and directed movie by Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain tackles the subject of historical trauma with quiet self-assurance. Many movies have been made about the Holocaust, most of them woefully insufficient, but few, if any, have portrayed the legacy of pain that lives in the descendants of the survivors. In this intimate, lived in, lovely movie, Eisenberg tackles the subject with biting humor and emotional maturity.

Two cousins, David (Eisenberg, in his usual tightly wound, neurotic cast) and Benji Kaplan (the spectacular Kieran Culkin) go on a heritage tour of Poland looking for their Jewish roots and their late grandmother’s house. The loss of their recently departed, Holocaust-surviving grandma triggers this Jewish heritage road trip in Poland. Eisenberg slyly comments on the cottage tourist industry that has sprung in places where entire Jewish communities were wiped out, the quaint little Jewish restaurants with kitschy music that now thrive on the ashes of extermination.

Benji is a loose cannon and David is the opposite; it’s a classic odd couple situation, except that charming, unpredictable, hyper sensitive Benji clearly has emotional problems. The rest of the tour group is comprised by a divorcee, a flinty Jewish couple, and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide that has converted to Judaism.