The real problem with ‘A Real Pain’ is that it isn’t Jewish enough

In college, I participated in an unforgettably tedious Birthright Israel trip. The students on my trip were bored by history, disinterested in the conflict and allergic to reflection. We wandered through Caesaria and a biblical nature reserve, kicking up dirt and looking longingly for opportunities to buy ice cream. As the tour bus sped along the wall that chokes the edge of the West Bank, we plugged in our headphones and stared at pictures on our phones instead of out the window at the evidence of the occupation.

When it came to the Holocaust, though, everyone finally had an opinion.

Our trip culminated in a visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum. That evening, our guide gathered us in the hotel basement conference room to discuss and reflect. The room erupted with conversation that had been absent all trip-long: descriptions of horrors witnessed and family members impacted, and expressions of proud Judaism.

Then, one person raised a hand and said that they felt the museum was “not sad enough.” Nods and affirmative “yeah”s went up around the room. I looked around, waiting for an angel of the divine or perhaps genocide scholar to smite them for expecting a tearjerker popcorn experience from a Holocaust museum. Instead, another one of my busmates noted that the museum’s evocativeness didn’t compare in impact to the D.C. Holocaust museum.

“Not enough shoes,” someone agreed.“Yes,” someone else replied, with a note of mouthwatering longing in their voice. “The D.C. museum had so many shoes!”

A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie, is ostensibly a showcase for this uncomfortable phenomenon: Holocaust tourism. It joins a small but burgeoning genre — Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed 2002 Jewish-Polish heritage road trip novel; Austerlitz, the 2016 documentary about visitors to the camps; and Delegation, an Israeli movie that premiered last year, about high schoolers on an obligatory teen concentration camp trip.

These works are opportunities to interrogate, among other things, the way that a typical Jewish approach to Holocaust education plays out: like an eerie version of a Passover seder. In every generation, we remind each other, we are obligated to see ourselves as if we were spared the suffering of the camps and the poison of the gas chambers. A Real Pain gets in the gas chambers, but it doesn’t get near this legacy.

The movie, written and directed by Eisenberg, follows a pair of cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) who join a heritage tour of Poland. Their Grandma Dory left them money in her will to allow them to see the town where she lived and the concentration camp, Majdanek, that she survived. What ensues is a sweet study of family dynamics — Benji with his mercurial charm and oozing emotional open wound, neurotic David chasing after him — alongside striking footage of a concentration camp; the movie’s most extraordinary shots are portraits of each pilgrim, frozen in shock in front of the gas chamber.

The  tour group includes Marcia (Jennifer Grey) a moneyed Los Angelean divorcee reckoning with the fact that her mother never spoke about what she survived. Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy) are self-identified “boring” retirees from Shaker Heights who have family “from here” who immigrated long before the Holocaust. Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) is a soft spoken Jew-by-choice, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and the only person on the trip who identifies as religious.

They are led by the astonishingly lifelike guide James (Will Sharpe, who played the taciturn techie married to Aubrey Plaza in the second season of White Lotus). James’ dialogue is so exasperatingly true to tour guide patter, a kind of anti-charisma made entirely of facts, that you get the sense that Eisenberg spent months trotting through Eastern Europe, eavesdropping on tour groups.

In elegant shots underscored by Chopin, the movie highlights the way Jewish life was erased from Lublin, and the way it has persisted — James highlights traces of a synagogue, a yeshiva, and a Jewish-owned brewery and stores. The group visits a 16th century Jewish graveyard and places stones on a grave. In Warsaw, James brings the group to the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and says that “this will be a tour about pain,” but also that he wants to “dispel the myth that they were led like lambs to the slaughter.”

Eisenberg puts together an extraordinarily authentic group of pilgrims. But there is something uncanny about them: Unlike their real-life counterparts, they are oddly incurious about the history they’re touring. They do not pepper their tour guide with questions or challenge his grasp of Jewish history. They resist debate and argument. The movie dodges questions that would be obvious fodder for any group of engaged Jews, let alone those who choose to spend their PTO trudging through concentration camps: synagogue life, interfaith relationships, God. That six Jews on a heritage tour of Eastern Europe do not breathe the word “Israel” is absurd.

Though half of the group is descended from survivors, they seem curiously un-haunted by the Holocaust. Never do they lapse into obsessive monologues, or wonder out loud which of their neighbors would have saved them, and which would have delivered them into the hands of the Gestapo — such staples of Jewish discussion of the Shoah that they’re discussed in viral TikToks and riffed on in short stories. The shock and subversion of filming in Majdanek is dampened by the characters’ references to antisemitism, which imply that it belongs wholly to the past.

As the group rides in the first-class compartment of a train to Lublin. Benji asks the group if anyone else feels “weird” about the uncomfortable resonances of being Jews on a train riding towards a concentration camp. But the group reacts like WASPS at a golf course learning the phrase “mutual aid.” “I don’t think anyone wants to hear this,” says Marcia. David tries to quiet his cousin. The Shaker Heights couple seems perplexed. When James gently suggests that those who visit Holocaust memorial sites might feel something like “guilt,” the Jews on the train stare up at him, seemingly unfamiliar with the concept. Who are these people?

It’s likely that Jews like this exist, but I doubt you’ll find many of them on a heritage tour of Poland. I have met Jews who identify as “basically anti-religious” and “a bad Jew but a good Wiccan” who can turn a conversation about anything — anything — into a conversation about the Holocaust. Right or left, Yeshiva-educated or barely Bar Mitzvah’d, they hear the word “annex” and feel the need to mention Anne Frank. They have at least one Holocaust nightmare in their bad dream repertoire. “Just like the Holocaust!” they say, about the movies Wicked, Star Wars, and Maleficent: II, about grimy gym showers, broken windows, and misinformation, about German accents, German Shepherds, cruel authority figures, and industrial smokestacks.

At dinner at a Jewish restaurant in Lublin, the group exchanges biographical snippets. David shares everything we’re ever going to learn about Grandma Dory: She lived in Poland. She “survived the camps through a thousand miracles.” She came to America where she rose through the corporate ranks from a secretarial job. She was “blunt and tough.”

“She always told me that she was grateful for her struggle,” says David, and the other members of the group make little empathetic noises. “What she endured,” offers Marcia, “that gave her hope.”

That this is an extraordinary sentiment for a Holocaust survivor is not something that David, Benji or the movie chooses to interrogate. It’s true that some Jewish people insist, inanely, on making the Holocaust into a life lesson. But the movie offers no criticism — or endorsement — of this approach.

Grandma Dory, the inspiration for this reverse exodus to Poland, is a photocopy of a sketch of a survivor. Her suffering exists in the story to give her grandchildren opportunities to more deeply consider their own suffering. Was Grandma Dory’s family slaughtered or saved? This information is conveniently uninteresting to the folks on the heritage tour. How did Dory escape? Not asked or answered. Did Dory’s experience — by any chance — create a legacy of trauma which impacted her children and grandchildren in ways that they can barely express?

Surely, this is what Eisenberg intends for the audience to understand. Both cousins are suffering. Benji is one of those people who grew up without developing a protective barrier between himself and the world; he is totally permeable to pain and joy, and it makes him a loose cannon (and a showcase for Culkin’s fearsome talent and quicksilver emotional responses). And David’s life is curtailed too, by some combination of millennial malaise and an anxiety disorder. “I know that my pain is unexceptional so I don’t feel the need to burden everyone with it,” he says. “How did this guy come from the survivors of this place?” David grouses about his cousin.

David and Benji appear to be the two secular Jewish millennials who have never heard of the concept of inherited trauma. If there is a connection to be made between their grandmother’s trauma and their crumbling mental states, the viewer is left to draw it on her own. And perhaps we wonder at the connection —  but because we know so little about Grandma Dory, and because David and Benji’s reflections on the Holocaust are so generic, it’s hard to draw much of a line between her pain and theirs.

For the heritage tour-goers in A Real Pain, pre-war Poland and the camps are opportunities to offer cliche reflections about “how lucky we are” and how “we numb ourselves to avoid thinking about our impact.” They react to the concentration camp with the same unspecific horror that they might display at Hiroshima, or the Chernobyl museum.

I want to see a version of the movie where Kieran Culkin shouts “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Germans did to the Jews!” and then Daniel Oreskes’ wealthy boomer character gets up to slug him but accidentally knocks out Kurt Egyiawan, who plays the Rwandan survivor. I want to see Jennifer Grey sitting on the tour bus, gazing out at the Polish countryside and listening to a podcast of David Wolpe or Sharon Brous sermons. I want to hear Jesse Eisenberg’s twitchy, shrill voice say the word “epigenetics.”

If these demands seem to hold A Real Pain to an unreasonable bar, it is only because the movie courts hyper-realism. It filmed scenes in Majdanek — the camera lingers on the blue bursts left behind on the walls by Zyklon-B, which look perversely like oil paint sponged onto a canvas. The “kitschy” Jewish restaurant where the group has dinner clearly resembles Restaurante Judeu Mandrágora, a Lublin restaurant dotted with Hanukkiahs and Fiddler on the Roof fan art. Every detail — David’s Indiana University baseball cap, Diane’s sensible Skechers, James’ plucky enthusiasm for gravestones — is intended to capture a “real” Jewish experience.

Eisenberg’s movie is interested in pain. It just doesn’t offer much insight into Jewish pain. And yet by using Holocaust memorial sites as a backdrop for a story about how life is suffering and suffering is sad, the movie inadvertently underscores the idea that the Holocaust is a generic pain, exchangeable with any other example of terrible suffering.

As a college student, I judged my peers’ responses to Yad Vashem, repelled by what I believed was a desire to reduce the Holocaust to horror porn. Watching A Real Pain, I thought of my tour companions with greater affection. They were Jews who didn’t care for the way their history was being served up to them and said so. They felt enough ownership over it to criticize, they cared enough to object. It wasn’t as entertaining as A Real Pain, but it was harder to forget.

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