Is "A Real Pain" a Holocaust Film?

Or is that question what the film is actually about?

As some of my readers probably know, once upon a time I started writing a novel—or a work of fiction, at any rate; it’s not really shaped like a novel—with the working title Memoirs of a Jewish Century whose spine is a trip by a Young Man Not Unlike Myself (I was young at the time I started writing it) who travels to Central Europe on a kind of Jewish heritage exploration thing, which is something I did in the early 1990 and which explains, perhaps, why I started writing said book in the first place since I began it right after returning from said trip. I worked on it for about five years before putting it on the shelf, deciding that I had no real idea what I was doing and that I was clearly too busy with my new finance career to finish it. A few years after I gave up, Jonathan Safran Foer came out with his first literary novel based on a somewhat similar premise. He did it all wrong, and he had enormous success with it, and as a result I gave up on the idea of writing fiction entirely and instead embraced the idea of hating Foer.

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing, I couldn’t bring myself to entirely abandon the project. I picked up pieces of it periodically over the years to fiddle with, but the fiddling never resulted in an actual tune. Then, toward the end of 2023, I picked it up again in earnest, with the intention of reworking it into something more retrospective (I’m more than thirty years older than when I began, and the original concept was very much a young man’s novel), and finally completing the damned thing. I didn’t manage finish even a complete first draft in 2024, but I did make substantial progress, and I really hope to finish a complete draft in 2025.

All of this is prologue to saying that Saturday night when I finally went to see Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, I went in with a lot of personal baggage unrelated to the film. After all, it’s about a journey back to Poland by two grandsons of a common grandmother—who survived the Holocaust and who was an important figure in both of their lives—searching for some kind of connection to her. I was hoping the film would simultaneously inspire me and not trigger feelings of being too late once again.

I liked the film quite a bit. Both Eisenberg (who plays David Kaplan) and his co-star, Kieran Culkin (who plays his first cousin, Benji Kaplan), are excellent in their roles, infusing their usual schticks with real humanity and specificity, and they have great chemistry together. The film glides visually over the surface of the country and the history they are exploring in precisely the way that an organized tour tends to do—I kept cringing at moments that reminded me of my own recent trip to Cuba—but it’s the opposite of glib; the cinematography is quite intentional and there are moments of real beauty. Most important, from my perspective, the emotional arc of the story felt both real and earned, which is not something you can be guaranteed of with Holocaust films.

But . . . is A Real Pain a Holocaust film? I’m not sure.

If I apply Rich Brownstein’s exacting criteria (which I am certainly not obliged to do), then the answer is no. The film isn’t about the experience of the Holocaust, neither about victims or survivors, nor about perpetrators, saviors or bystanders. Surely it’s about our contemporary relationship to the Holocaust, though, right? That, after all, is what all of the people on the tour are there for, and David and Benji are there specifically because of the relationship they had with their grandmother, who was herself a survivor. So surely we can call it a Holocaust film in the sense that it’s about how that historic horror still looms over our lives today despite the distance in time and despite our lack of any direct experience of it. More pointedly, with regard to David and Benji, it’s about generational trauma, that ubiquitous contemporary notion about the way in which terrible things that happened to one generation ramify down through subsequent generations.

Except, after seeing the film, I’m not convinced it’s about that at all—or, rather, I feel like the film aims to complicate rather than affirm the relevance of the very notion. (Regular readers know that I’m an inveterate spoiler, so if you care about that sort of thing, you can stop reading now.)

About halfway through the film, after Benji has made a scene at a group dinner—Benji is continually making scenes, some of them charming, some mortifying, and many with a foot in both camps—and then fled to the bathroom, David reveals to the rest of the group that six months ago his cousin attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. We’ve already learned that David and Benji’s grandmother died at around that same time, and we also know that Benji considered his grandmother to be the most important person in his life, the only person in the family who he was sure cared about him and whom he knew he could really rely on. So it’s reasonable to conclude that the suicide attempt, though it clearly had deeper roots, was triggered by that loss. That’s why David and Benji are in Poland: not to learn about the Holocaust or to come to grips with how their family was shaped by the reverberations of that epochal trauma, but to reconnect with a specific person whom Benji can’t bear having lost. That’s the real pain.

By saying that, I don’t mean to suggest that the fact that grandma was a survivor couldn’t have had anything to do with either Benji’s pain or David’s. Benji is one of those guys who “failed to launch” and who has always lacked the usual emotional defenses against the world; David, by way of saying that his pain is nothing special, talks about taking pills for his OCD and is clearly someone who is on edge all the time, even when he isn’t worrying about his potentially-suicidal cousin while visiting a death camp. Is it possible that these problems have something to do with the legacy of having been raised by people who were raised by someone who survived Majdanek? Sure. But it’s notable that David’s take is the opposite, that it strikes him a weird that the grandson of a Holocaust survivor could have as much trouble as Benji has just navigating normal life. His grandmother survived by a miracle, but having survived, she was resilient. Why isn’t her grandson? (Fine, you might say, that’s also a post-Holocaust kind of question to ask. But it’s not uniquely a post-Holocaust question; it’s also a question asked of young people whose grandparents went through the Great Depression, or immigrated from Vietnam, or migrated up from the Jim Crow South—it’s an intergenerational cliché with such broad applicability as to be well-nigh universal.)

Some critics have noted that there’s very little distinctly Jewish about the film: the guide isn’t Jewish, David and Benji’s Jewishness is nominal, nobody talks about rising antisemitism, nor about Israel (either as a necessary response to the Holocaust or as a possible perpetrator of genocide itself). The film even declines an opportunity to bring the characters face to face with Polish antisemitism; when David and Benji visit their grandmother’s old home, they are observed by a Polish neighbor who wants to know what they are doing there, and we’re all teed up for a confrontation over whether they might want to reclaim the house, and . . . no such confrontation happens. I have to assume these omissions are deliberate, which is to say: both the Jews in the film and the film itself are strikingly not traumatized by the Holocaust. So what are they, and the film, doing on this tour?

As it happens, the only person on the tour with a direct connection to genocide is also the only one with a meaningful living connection to Judaism—but it isn’t the connection you’d expect. Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) survived Rwanda’s early-’90s genocide, and that trauma ultimately led him to Judaism, which for the rest of the group was largely interred here in Poland. In one of my favorite little moments in the film, David asks Eloge about his conversion, wondering among other things whether he’s really observant, and Eloge admits that he isn’t strictly so, but that he does like to observe Shabbat to some degree, to take a time out from life once a week and just be. He suggests to David that Shabbat might be good for him too, and David asks: good for me because it’s good for everybody, or good for me specifically? With a wry smile, Eloge clarifies: good for you specifically. I loved that moment because it was so diametrically opposed to Holocaust Judaism, framing Judaism not as being about trauma but as being useful for dealing with trauma, because it is useful for dealing with life generally.

As for the other tourists, they are not trying to grapple with trauma; they’re just looking for connection, for roots, as Americans of various origins are wont to do without ever really knowing what they’re looking for—and the cemetery of Lublin and the ash heap of Majdanek are where these Americans think their roots are buried. The film, though, is doing something slier. By refusing to be explicitly about generational trauma stemming from the Holocaust, and instead being about, well, the trauma of ordinary life, the film shows us the road not taken, and lets us appreciate that it didn’t take that road of bleeding history, but stayed with the living.

I, for one, appreciated that immensely.

(As for what that means for my own project, I’m trying not to think about it too much.)