It’s perhaps apt for someone acclaimed and Oscar-nominated for playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that Jesse Eisenberg’s next possible trip to the Academy Awards would involve something meta.
A Real Pain is Eisenberg’s second film as writer and director, and given its four Golden Globe nominations. it’s likely to figure in the Oscar race, too.
Eisenberg also stars in the self-referential comedy drama about two Jewish-American cousins on a Holocaust history tour in Poland.
Their trip takes them to the childhood home of their recently deceased grandmother Dory, a Holocaust survivor. The house used in the film was where Eisenberg’s own Aunt Doris had lived before the Holocaust.
A Real Pain is not his first work inspired by family history. In his 2013 off-Broadway play The Revisionist, Eisenberg played a self-absorbed American writer staying with his elderly Polish second cousin, a Holocaust survivor, played by Vanessa Redgrave.
He attempted a film adaptation but couldn’t make it work. But later, while working on a script about two American guys visiting Mongolia, an adaptation of one of his short stories, up popped an ad on his computer screen. “Auschwitz tours” it offered, “with lunch”.
It was a lightbulb moment. Sending the pair to Poland instead would be a better idea. It would give the story something to say. His play had contrasted the contemporary anxiety and self-centredness of the writer with the suffering of his forebears.
A Real Pain does that too, sort of, especially with the character of Benji, the temperamental cousin of Eisenberg’s steadier David. He’s played by Kieran Culkin, adding another outlandish motormouth after four seasons of playing Roman Roy in Succession.
His Benji becomes the life of the seven-strong tour party while David, a guy who sells online advertising, frets about his cousin’s impulsiveness. Their pilgrimage takes them to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland’s southeast, which Eisenberg the director delivers with dialogue-free scenes in what is otherwise a very chatty movie.
On a Zoom call to the Listener from Los Angeles, Eisenberg’s answers are delivered in the rapid-fire patter that has been a trademark of his characters in more than 40 films, including Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
It’s a movie about these two characters, but it’s a movie about some big ideas – intergenerational trauma, a search for Jewish identity. Did you set out to write a movie about those ideas or did the characters take you there?
The movie was actually originally set in Mongolia, and it was missing the second layer of storytelling … and so I took those characters out of Mongolia, and I put them in Poland on a Holocaust tour, and suddenly all those themes emerged. I guess I had been searching for something to put these two guys in that spoke to their interpersonal grief and internal pain in a way that would not just be amusing, but actually comment on what they’re experiencing. So, putting these two guys, who were both internally struggling and interpersonally struggling, against the backdrop of real, objective trauma, allowed me to tell that story in a way that wasn’t too didactic.
Do you see this as another in a line of Holocaust films? Or is it more about pondering the Holocaust when it becomes a movie or a tourist attraction?
I was just very conscious that I didn’t want to make a Holocaust movie that I’ve seen before. It’s the defining feature in every Jewish family’s life – if you survived or if your family survived, they’re ridden with survivor’s guilt. And if the family died, you’re ridden with horror stories. So, for a lot of Jews who write scripts, this is a story that at some point they feel they need to tackle, because it’s a big part of their lives. I was very conscious of making a movie about the Holocaust that didn’t feel exclusively maudlin, that could be reverential to the history without being reverential to the characters.
That the characters could be these transgressive stoners but at the same time, have a great respect for the history and where they fit into it. I was just trying to create something that felt welcoming to an audience and felt like something I would want to watch, and also felt like something that I lived through – I’ve done all these tours. Sometimes you’re not crying, sometimes you’re walking around and you’re tired or you’re cold. The last time I did a tour of Majdanek it was unexpectedly freezing, and I didn’t have a jacket, and I just remember thinking, “I cannot believe I’m complaining and feeling bad for myself about why I didn’t pack a jacket.” Then I was just thinking of the people who had been herded, naked, through these horrifying buildings. The thing I took away from that experience was how strange that I could simultaneously feel bad for myself while also understanding that my problems are specks of sand on the beach of history. That’s what I was trying to capture.
If you survived or if your family survived, they’re ridden with survivor’s guilt. And if the family died, you’re ridden with horror stories.
The film’s scenes of the tour party at Majdanek had no dialogue. Was that always the case?
I had written another scene that was a little more bombastic and theatrical and dialogue driven. I also had this scene that had no dialogue in it and was very austere, with no music and very simple camera positions. It just seemed like that’s the way to go. In some ways, when you’re shooting in a place like that, it does all the work for you dramatically and to add any drama to a scene in a concentration camp is to, in some ways, undermine the power of the camp. The camp should speak for itself. The buildings and the industrial systems of murder are so overwhelmingly evocative that to do a cool camera move on to an actor’s face would cheapen it.
On a lighter note, how do you direct yourself in a film where the character you’re playing opposite is, by nature, the scene-stealer?
Yeah, it’s weird. I was originally going to play the Benji part … but I think it would have just been very tough to play that kind of role, and also direct this movie. In some ways, it was natural that I was playing a character who is also the one planning the tour, and doing the scheduling for his cousin, who’s irresponsible. The only problem with it is it’s like in the scenes where my character is really self-conscious and self-doubting, it just made me have that same feeling of self-consciousness and self-doubt while I was directing.
Has the movie benefited from this being the first thing Kieran Culkin has done since Succession?
No, in some ways it was bad luck because somebody who’s been on a series is so distinctly known for something, and here I am bringing him into this movie where he’s still fast talking and transgressive. The danger is that people see that character, but the genius of Kieran is that he’s so real and lived-in and has this great sadness behind his eyes in the movie, that audiences see him as this new guy within a few minutes.
Given your family ties to the story, and having characters on a trip hoping it would give them a profound experience, how has making the film been in terms of looking for meaning in your own life?
Every time I expect to find meaning, I’m always surprised that it doesn’t come from the expected places. When in 2008 my wife and I travelled to Poland explicitly to visit this house that my family lived in – it’s the house where we filmed the movie – we wound up in front of this house and I remember expecting to have some kind of emotional catharsis, and I just didn’t. It was this interesting kind of disconnect between what I expected to feel and what I was actually feeling that stayed with me more than anything. It occurred to me that when we try to connect to history, we do it in all sorts of clumsy, awkward ways that don’t often give us the satisfaction or fulfilment we’re looking for. So, in a way, that’s what this movie is doing. What I was trying to show is that really cathartic things happen interpersonally, not with abstract history.
A Real Pain is in cinemas now.
