Last Friday no one was paying me to do anything so I did a bunch of admin towards paid work and took myself off to World of Cine to see Jesse Eisenberg’s latest cinematic offering.
It’s a film whose appeal gradually crept on me and was confirmed by Mark Kermode’s review for Kermode and Mayo’s Take. A thousand years ago when I was doing my MA in film, I took a module called ‘Cinema and Memory’ which was largely built around texts concerning the Holocaust, mainly documentaries and archive-based imaginings. The module was foundational in the ideas that formed the basis of my PhD on visual culture in post-Agreement Northern Ireland and later research on postmemory/post-conflict societies. I can see A Real Pain being included in a later update of such a module.
I loved every moment of watching this film. It’s odd to say you enjoy anything with content that squarely confronts the Holocaust along with awareness of other more recent genocides, but Eisenberg and everyone ivolved in the transatlantic production has clearly considered the weight of real events that are nonetheless unimaginable to many of us. They help make the unutterable utterable while handling the grief, the guilt, the shifts to modern life and peace many of the characters represent.
There is a lot of language in psychology and mental health awareness currently around holding space for things, and that’s what A Real Pain felt like to me: space and time to hold the complexities, the shallows and the depths of any and all degrees of carrying the Shoah, the Catastrophe, and any number of past, happening and future widespread acts of the utmost violence brought by mass extermination.
The film holds joy, hurt, frustration and traumatic legacies in good balance. It questions and counters and confronts with curiosity. It carries and presents a range of experiences, fully aware of its own navel-gazing potential, and by calling it out honestly, it asks, reasonably, why subsequent generations of war migrants should carry guilt or suffer in solidarity.
I’ve seen many films that visit concentration camps in Poland, perhaps most notably Alain Resnais’s short documentary Night and Fog (1956) that comprises both archival footage recorded by the Nazis and his own original images made in the mid-1950s ten years after they were abandoned. It is Auschwitz and Majdanek that feature, and Majdanek, near Lublin, is revisited in a similarly contemplative way in A Real Pain almost seventy years later.
Majdanek might be one of the most preserved sites given how fast it was vacated during its liberation by Soviet forces in July 1944. The film follows cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) making a pilgrimmage there after the death of their grandmother who had grown up in the area and emigrated to the United States after surviving the camp. They join a tour group led by English James (Will Sharpe) whose excursions build up gently towards the visit to Majdanek on their third day.
During the scenes set at the site I got the impression there was no acting required. Culkin in an insightful interview with Simon Mayo said who the actors were and who they were pretending to be fell away. They were simply there. It felt like a privilege to share, if in a mediated way, in their quiet bearing witness throughout the site, gently informed by James confirming only the most essential aspects for clarity.
The cast and range of characters are fantastic. The group also includes couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), Marcia (Jennifer Grey) and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan). With these people as well as with the locations and personal stories, Eisenberg blends documentary with fiction. As he explains in the same interview with Mayo, Eloge is based on a real person he met who is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s and who found such affinity with descendants of Holocaust survivors that he converted to Judaism.
I know I bring it up a lot, and I know my relatively privileged position, but as a young experiencer, shall we say, of civil conflict, seeing someone from a broadly similar circumstance being so welcomed into acts of at once personal and collective memory and remembrance gives me tremendous hope. When I was still in academia, my research broadened to comparisons between Northern Ireland and other post-conflict and post-dictatorship (I suppose generally ‘post’-violent places). My utopian aim was that carefully shared experiences mediated through film and audiovisual culture could work towards generating networks of empathy and understanding - as comes up in A Real Pain - and teach us to stop hurting each other. I see instead humanity ever cycling, but I also want to believe we’ll incrementally do better and in time develop better memories down the generations.
Another important issue the film raises is the impact on mental health of generational transferred collective and personal trauma. Where the ‘Troubles’ is concerned, I strangely straddle direct experience and postmemory. I was thirteen when the referendum on peace was held and the Belfast Agreement signed. I have direct memories of some things, memories of news reports and what I learned was happening directly to people I knew from the time, then the second- and third-hand experiences of family, my community, and people I came to know or read about as I aged and learned about it all from a more historical perspective. During this time I was mindful of the responsibility I had to take care with real people’s real pain. It was a lot to carry, and required balanced release. So I couldn’t help but feel a personal as well as creative and intellectual appreciation for what Eisenberg has achieved. And like him, my name was on the document, but I certainly did not accomplish it alone.
Special mention should go to Culkin. What he achieves in this, his fearlessness, it’s what he’s been building up to since his early work in Igby Goes Down, a quite annoying and obscure indie from 2002. In A Real Pain he gives an incredible performance that is necessarily let loose and utterly convincing. He presents an important contrast with Eisenberg’s half of the odd couple who on the surface is perfectly fine, but whose difficulties are medicated officially and in socially acceptable hidden ways, then further salved by the legitimate, relevant job and the ideal wife and adorable child. Culkin’s Benji is and is in the real pain of the title, in so many ways. He is fire and ice, immediate yet nostalgic, lonely and the soul of the party, the adhesive glue and the hammer smash. He is trauma embodied. He is on his absent present surface what so many of us are nine-tenths under. It is phenomenal work and somehow I too felt held when it wasn’t my experience. And yet it was, because I’m a human, with an imagination, and I feel.
I was absorbed for ninety minutes - an ideal duration, lovingly and appropriately soundtracked with Chopin. See it if you can. It’s funny but not a comedy. It’s hard but not depressing. It’s aware but not didactic. It is pure, beautifully filmed (by a largely Polish crew) and unceasing love. It is the stone left in memory of those we’ve lost and those who made us, and which marks that we were here.
A lovely read. I’ll have to watch it x