A buddy comedy-drama revolving around a Holocaust-centric Jewish heritage tour? While this may seem like a far-fetched idea, it is the plot of “A Real Pain,” the critically acclaimed 2024 film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Well-written and expertly performed, the film simultaneously manages to break out of and is trapped by the tropes that plague all Holocaust movies.
The film follows two adult cousins, David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benjamin “Benji” Kaplan (Kieran Culkin), as they participate in a Polish Jewish heritage tour in honor of their recently-deceased grandmother, who fled Poland during the Holocaust.
The duo, despite being close as children, have since drifted apart and find themselves repeatedly at odds. Benji is outspoken and spontaneous, while David is more pragmatic and reserved. Ultimately, this difference leads to repeated clashes throughout the trip, with Benji pushing back against what he sees as an overly clinical tour and David trying to limit his embarrassing cousin’s outbursts. Over the course of the film, the audience learns more about the roots of the duo’s conflict and sees them attempt to mend the rifts, with a result I urge you to see for yourself.
Overall, “A Real Pain” is incredibly well constructed. The comedy — which has a semi-awkward situational humor — usually lands. The film is both well-written and beautifully shot, providing a more vibrant look at Poland that is a welcome change from the generally gray and drab depictions of Eastern Europe. This refreshed representation also serves to emphasize that Poland was a home for Jews for centuries — not just killing fields and earth camps — and reminds people that, for better or worse, hundreds of vibrant places have complicated and dark pasts. However, the film ultimately hinges on the main actors, each of whom deliver a stand-out performance, though Culkin steals the show in a performance that more than earned him an Academy Award win.
While “A Real Pain” can stand on its own, it is better understood when seen in conversation with the second- and third-generation survivor experience and Holocaust films as a whole. According to Eisenberg, he wrote the film after coming across an online Auschwitz tour ad. In writing “A Real Pain,” he sought to pay homage to the struggles survivors’ descendants face in trying to accurately honor and understand what their ancestors went through. Eisenberg also wanted to acknowledge the struggles of him and other descendants to reconcile their daily difficulties with the far more trying lives of their ancestors.
When it comes to touching on these themes, Eisenberg does a phenomenal job, perhaps due to being a descendant himself. As a descendant of both Holocaust survivors and victims, I felt that he accurately captured the sentiments and struggles that I and others I know have. This is especially true for those my age or younger, as most of us either barely remember the survivors in our families or were born after they passed away.
However, the film struggles far more when placed alongside other Holocaust films. For better or worse, Holocaust media has become a genre in and of itself, complete with tropes and a general formula — normal people struggle to survive either in the camps or while evading being sent to them. Even “A Real Pain,” which emphasizes a different angle and breaks away from many of the tropes, is still quite reminiscent of “Everything Is Illuminated,” a 2005 comedy-drama starring Elijah Wood as he took his own Jewish heritage tour with a comedic local duo. More importantly, “A Real Pain” continues to perpetuate a very specific picture of the Holocaust in terms of both victims and experience.
First, “A Real Pain” continues to limit the Holocaust experience to the camps, which — while both horrifying and something that should never be forgotten — were not the only place where Jews died. These camps — depicted in films like “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (2008) and “Life is Beautiful” (1997) — are the setting of many Holocaust movies and have shaped a popular understanding that sees them as the place where almost all Jews died. Yet hundreds of thousands of Jews, including many of my ancestors, were murdered en masse in ravines, fields and forests throughout Eastern Europe. In failing to acknowledge the full spectrum of cases, this film contributes to an accidental erasure of the experience of hundreds of thousands of victims.
Second, the film covers just a small snippet of all victims — again contributing to an incidental erasure of hundreds of thousands of victims. Near the beginning, the main two characters joke about Hasidic Jews, a subsect of Orthodox Jews, using them as an example of what their lives could have been like if the Holocaust never happened and their family never fled to the United States. Hasidic Jews and other Orthodox Jews constituted hundreds of thousands of the Holocaust’s victims, but their stories are largely unknown outside of their communities, with a few notable exceptions. This is in part because the majority of popular Holocaust media and accounts — including “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Schindler’s List” — have centered Jews from other religious backgrounds and largely excluded Orthodox Jewry, likely due to their narratives being less accessible and relatable to general audiences.
While “A Real Pain” is a phenomenal film that also does a wonderful job of providing a fresh perspective on the Holocaust, it also finds itself stuck in the same rut as other Holocaust films.
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Zev van Zanten is a Trinity junior and recess editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.