Don’t look now, but older Jewish millennials are entering middle age, many with careers and families firmly entrenched. When we grew up learning about Jewish history and the atrocities of the Holocaust, it seemed like the not-so-long-ago past. Then at some point, 40 years ago became 75 years ago. Time flies. Time also, as the saying goes, heals all wounds. Right? But what if the wounds don’t heal as much as they transform and re-shape as they pass down through the generations?
A Real Pain concerns itself with this very topic, one that has gained more traction in recent years—generational trauma. The idea that our lives, our minds, our very bodies are still impacted by forces from our collective past, even if our daily lives go on without much upheaval. The movie follows two Jewish-American cousins, David and Benji (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), who travel to Poland and join a tour group to retrace their family lineage after their grandmother’s recent passing. She survived a concentration camp as a little girl, to emigrate to America and start a new life.
The cousins were once brotherly close, spending their twenties on drunken adventures in Brooklyn. Then life choices sent them on their separate ways—David to a family of his own and Benji to his mother’s basement in Binghamton, NY, smoking copious amounts of marijuana and doing little else.
The film reckons with the Jewish experience of what it is like to “go home again” only to find you may have nothing to take with you.
David and Benji join a group of other Jews on the same journey, with different stories and backgrounds, but the same goal—to explore what may be left of the places their ancestors came from. Among them is Marcia, played by Jennifer Grey in a fascinating bit of casting. Grey, the star of Dirty Dancing, famously got a nose job and later wrote that people didn’t recognize her, that she lost work and felt “not as a whole person but as a nose.” That she plays a Jewish character who is retracing, and in a sense reclaiming, her sense of self has a certain meta-textual layer to it.
A particularly engaging subplot involves Eloge (played by Kurt Egyiawan of House of the Dragon), a Rwandan refugee and survivor of the 1994 genocide. He converted to Judaism because he recognized himself in it, and found peace there. As a an observant practitioner, he is probably more intimately familiar with the Jewish religion than anyone else on the trip. His steadfast embrace probably masks some deep pain as well, but it doesn’t present itself this way. What makes him so different from David and Benji? A lot, of course—but this part of the movie got me wondering why it seems so hard for them to have any kind of gratitude.
Together the group travels through Poland, exploring the places that Ashkenazi Jews once called home. There is an understandable sadness here about wanting to visit one’s homeland, where your people are from, and knowing that only traces remain. Revisiting your family’s village often means visiting an empty field of grass. Everyday things take on a different meaning—taking a train ride, or seeing a police officer. The atmosphere is imbued with an eerie paranoia, in a country filled with ghosts. Yet in great Jewish tradition, there is plenty of comedy to be mined from tragedy.
The duo’s comic journey recalls Planes, Trains & Automobiles. David is the highly neurotic Steve Martin character, and Benji fills the John Candy role—the firecracker, bull in the china shop. Benji says inappropriate things at inappropriate moments, cusses like a sailor and is unrestrained in compelling his tour mates to participate in the generally bizarre. He leads them on side quests that threaten to derail the entire trip. Where David wishes to remain in a shell, Benji comes along with a hammer to bash that shell apart. But just like in Plains, Trains & Automobiles, Benji’s eccentricity is funny until it isn’t.
Underneath that eccentric exterior lies a deeper pain and a secret that David is keenly aware of. The added context that Benji was so close to his grandmother when growing up leaves a number of questions to be answered. Is what Benji is carrying with him simply a diagnosable mental illness, or is it an inherited generational trauma? What did he acquire in those formative years he spent so close to his grandmother? What did he see, what did she tell him? Finally, as the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, is he even allowed to do so little with his life? A Real Pain does not provide many of these answers but rather leaves blanks for the viewers to fill in with their own experiences.
Then comes the part of the tour the whole trip has been leading to, when they arrive at the Madjanek concentration camp. At this point, words serve little purpose. The non-Jewish tour guide, James (Will Sharpe) knows this—up until this point he’s shown a largely academic interest in the history, but finally finds some room for silence. Words fall short as the place speaks for itself. While this serves as a sort of emotional climax, Eisenberg, who wrote and directed the film, makes an interesting choice to not linger much. The camps may be a central part of the Jewish experience, but they don’t make up the entirety.
As Benji and David’s journey comes to a close, A Real Pain reckons with the Jewish experience of what it is like to “go home again” only to find you may have nothing to take with you. Not really a spoiler, but the film ends where it began, at JFK International Airport. The theme of transience stood out to me. The Jews have long been familiar with, and associated with, exile. We all know about the trope of the wandering Jew. Everyone wants to find a place to call home, but perhaps some part of our souls will forever remain in exile. As long as we can stay close to the ones we love, maybe that is enough.
Top image: A Real Pain (Credit: Spotlight Pictures).