‘A Real Pain’ is a real triumph

(RNS) — You will go to see “A Real Pain” because of the all-star cast of Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed it), Kieran Culkin (whom many of us loved in “Succession”) and Jennifer Grey (welcoming her back to the big screen).

You will go to see this movie because it is the story of the relationship between David Kaplan and Benji Kaplan, two Jewish cousins, each with their own quirks. If you had watched the series “Succession,” you will nod knowingly, as Kieran does a great job of reprising the personality traits of Roman Roy, his character from that show.

You will go to see this movie (or, at least, I did) because it takes place in Poland and is the story of those two cousins and a tour group seeing various Jewish sites in Poland. During the tour, Benji and David take a side trip to a small town in Poland to find their late grandmother’s old house. (This is based on a trip that Jesse and his now-wife took to his great-aunt’s former house in Poland.)

All of those things are true, and yet, they are not true enough. “A Big Pain” is all of that and more. It is that admirable example of a movie that tells a small, compact story — the relationship between the two cousins — that is itself contained in a much larger story about Jewish identity, memory, the Holocaust and how the past serves and fails to serve us.

I recently returned from two weeks in Poland. Every single place in that movie — Warsaw, the trains in Poland, the Majdanek concentration camp, Lublin — is a place that I have visited and contains powerful, even searing memories for me.

What particularly resonated for me was Jesse Eisenberg’s uncanny wisdom and vision in shaping his characters and his sense of the meaning and edges of Jewish identity today.

For example, there is James (Will Sharpe), the English tour guide operating in Poland. At the outset of the trip, he announces to the group he is not Jewish, but Jewish history resonates within him.

I “know” James. Poland contains many non-Jews who love Jewish history and practices, and in some uncanny ways, they have internalized that love and have made it a part of their lives.

There is the character of Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan). He is from Rwanda, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and has converted to Judaism. One reason is that the Jewish experience of genocide echoes his own family’s experience. With that, it is not the darkness of Jewish history that has brought him into the Jewish people; it is the light of Shabbat, as well.

These are not “stock characters,” not cliches, not your standard characters in a post-Holocaust drama. They are real and they are nuanced.

Or, consider the group’s visit to the concentration camp of Majdanek. Jesse Eisenberg had an infinite number of ways he could have handled this sequence. And yet, he portrays James, the guide, just letting the camp tell its own story. That was the right move.

I must reserve a special shout out to Jesse Eisenberg. What Jesse has accomplished in this movie is nothing less than a triumph — one of the most powerful, serious, unsentimental statements about Jewish identity to hit the silver screen in quite a long time.

Obviously, this movie was in the planning stages before Oct. 7, but that its release coincides with the one-year anniversary is, whether Jesse intended it or not, its own statement. It is not his first “Jewish” dramatic statement; in 2013, his play, “The Revisionist,” which is about the Holocaust, appeared in New York City. (There was also his role as a Hasidic drug dealer in “Holy Rollers” and the FX series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.”)

Jesse has stepped out, stepped up and stepped forward. When Jews start counting admirable Jewish celebrities, he deserves to be on that list.

Finally, there is the name of the movie itself — “A Big Pain.”

That might refer to Kieran Culkin’s Benji. He is all over the place, cringe worthy, inappropriate, kind, clueless, scattered, troubled, light-hearted, irresponsible, loving, playful, a stoner, dark. I suspect anyone traveling with him, as most of the group in the movie did, would find him a “real pain.”

But, then again, there is another interpretation of that “real pain.” And that is the “real pain” that Benji, in fact, carries with him and within him: the pain of Grandmother Dora’s death; the pain of being in Poland; the pain of the Holocaust. After the visit to Majdanek, he is sitting on the train, weeping — and it is as if the pain of the Holocaust is exiting his body.

And yet, another interpretation of “a real pain” is the experience itself. Each of the characters comes to that experience with real pain — personal pain, generational pain, historical pain.

Few recent films have evoked this pain as passionately and as patiently as this movie has done.

It is a triumph, and we — the Jewish people and all those who are involved in the art of memory — are indebted to Jesse Eisenberg.

As we would say in synagogue: Yasher koach! (May your strength keep you going straight!)