27 January (Holocaust Memorial Day) marked 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Eight decades later, the world is still reckoning with its legacy and some artists – including Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Glazer – have articulated their personal feelings on the screen.
Jesse Eisenberg’s new film A Real Pain follows Jewish-American cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a tour of Poland as they honour their recently deceased grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor.
As they journey to her childhood home over several days, they come to realise how differently they’ve reacted to her passing. David, a conventional family man, is reserved and polite but also deeply neurotic and self-conscious.
Benji feels everything fully and openly, which leads to some visceral outbursts but also moments of great warmth, allowing him to connect with lonely divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey) and Eloge (a wonderful Kurt Egiyawan), a Jewish convert and survivor of the Rwandan genocide.
Kieran Culkin’s performance is one of a kind but somehow utterly familiar – a directionless slacker who uses humour to deflect from his issue but might just be the most emotionally intelligent person in the room.
“Dave,” he says in an exchange that may win him an Oscar, “we’re on a Holocaust tour. If now isn’t the time and place to grieve, to open up, then I don’t know what to tell you, man.”
Tonally, A Real Pain walks a delicate line as it explores grief with humour and self-effacing introspection, but never making light of the atrocities it touches on.
Eisenberg wrote the film based on his own upbringing in a nonreligious Jewish family and even incorporates his love of classical music by scoring the film to Polish pianist Chopin.
His performance is more restrained than Culkin’s but this is particularly effective in the film’s darker scenes.
When the tour group reaches the remains of a concentration camp, the music cuts out entirely – leaving us alone with their footsteps and Kieran Culkin’s hitched breathing which eventually sees the pair breaking into sobs.
Personally, I think those sounds convey his anguish better than any orchestra ever could.
The film also takes an opportunity to critique the practice of ‘Dark Tourism,’ travel organised around places associated with death and misfortune.
Non-Jewish tour guide James (Will Sharpe) is knowledgeable but detached, focusing on statistics rather than the human lives lost.
Benji takes issue with the tour’s luxury travel methods, pointing out the irony of them “being treated like royalty” while tracing the persecution of their ancestors.
Towards the film’s end, James thanks Benji for giving him constructive criticism, in his own abrupt manner.
A Real Pain is empathetic to the different ways people grieve and cope with the past, and never suggests that Benji or David is less affected by their grandmother’s death because they deal with it dissimilarly.
It’s the kind of film that could have easily gone too far one way or the other, descending into a tone-deaf screwball road movie, or a bleak lamentation of grief with no hope in sight.
However, Jesse Eisenberg is a precise writer, and, I suspect, someone who understands that life has a way of twisting unimaginable pain and immeasurable love into one.
The people who were murdered in the Holocaust weren’t statistics, as Benji puts it, and it’s important to remember that they lived just as much as they died.
A Real Pain is currently in UK Theatres, including the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham.
Feature Photo: All credit to the filmmakers and producers of A Real Pain