‘A Real Pain’: Just Your Average Millennial Generational Holocaust Trauma Buddy Comedy

Jesse Eisenberg has played Woody Allen in a movie. Now, with his new film A Real Pain, which he wrote and directed, he gets to be a Woody Allen-like auteur. If Allen were a millennial and interested in exploring third-generation Holocaust trauma, but still had a sense of humor, A Real Pain would be his movie. It’s small-scale, quietly funny, not for everyone, but very very Jewish. This year has tested Jewish identity like no year in a long time, but we’ve had some cultural products to counteract the anti-Jew sentiment in the air. The indie film Between the Temples was twitchy and religious, Nobody Wants This was a pop romance, but A Real Pain is probably the best of the three, warm and sensitive and willing to broach the most serious of topics with humor.

A REAL PAIN ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Jesse Eisenberg
Written by: Jesse Eisenberg
Starring: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Grey, Will Sharpe
Running time: 90 mins

Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are cousins on a historical tour of Poland, thanks to a bequest from their late grandmother, who survived the camps and wanted her grandchildren to see where she’d grown up. Culkin plays Benjy, and has the showier standout role. He’s a depressed loser who lives in his parents’ basement, but he also vibrates at a high frequency. He’s the risk-taking life of the party. Eisenberg’s character, David, is more repressed, but he’s also more stable, with a happy family and a stable and boring job selling Internet ad banners. Benjy was his grandmother’s “favorite,” she was his best friend, and that’s both a blessing and a curse.

For Jewish people who grew up in a family of survivors, or, in my case, people who left Germany behind in the mid-1930s, barely escaping the horrors of  WWII, Benjy’s instability feels very familiar. He can barely keep it together, smoking too much pot and drifting through the world with childlike curiosity but also childlike lack of direction. David keeps it together through exercise and antidepressants and rigid routine. Benjy is like the id of generational Holocaust trauma let loose on the world. When their tour group visits a concentration camp, the rest of the group falls asleep afterward or stares out the window blankly. But Benjy openly sobs. He’s a raw nerve, so attuned to the suffering of the world that he cannot function.

All that makes A Real Pain sound like a real drag, but it’s not. Culkin is an actor at the height of his powers, and this movie is the ultimate display of the man-boy energy that make him such a standout in ‘Succession.’ He hands out endearing quips like they’re Halloween candy. His character is soulful and completely realized. Eisenberg has the less showy role, but he’s never less than believable.

A Real Pain is essentially a two-character play, though I also enjoyed Jennifer Grey, in full MILF mode, as a divorcee also on the tour, and Will Sharpe from season two of The White Lotus as a nerdy tour guide who needs to learn a lesson about his mostly Jewish clientele. There’s also, interestingly, a Rwandan character, an actual survivor of genocide, who decided to convert to Judaism in the United States, because he feels that Judaism speaks to his situation and his legacy of suffering. But the script doesn’t give him much time to develop.

In general, the script doesn’t give anyone enough time to develop. It’s a two-character play, and not much happens. It’s a deep slice of life without resolution. And Eisenberg relies too heavily on piano music–is it Chopin?–to transition between scenes. Everything feels simultaneously too heavy and too light. But in a time where, for some reason, we’re still debating the legacy of the Holocaust, it’s a relief to see a cultural product that takes that legacy seriously. Eighty years after the end of the war, the genocide of the Jews is still claiming victims, even if those victims are sensitive millennial slackers who seem to enjoy hanging out in airports.