The Real Pain of “A Real Pain”

Adam Sobsey analyzes the new film “A Real Pain” and his own search for his Jewish roots.

By Adam SobseyFebruary 16, 2025

• Film

• Memoir & Essay

I WAS SUSPICIOUS when I first heard about Jesse Eisenberg’s new film A Real Pain (2024). A feel-good movie about two semi-estranged cousins who reunite against the backdrop of a tour of Holocaust sites? I couldn’t help thinking of Pauline Kael’s objection to Spalding Gray’s 1987 performance piece Swimming to Cambodia—that Gray “thinks like an actor; he doesn’t know that heating up his piddling stage act by an account of the Cambodian misery is about the most squalid thing anyone could do.”

I confess I’m suspicious of most stories based on the Holocaust, and I’m not alone. In “Fictional Dead Jews,” one of the essays collected in Dara Horn’s 2021 book People Love Dead Jews, Horn deplores the widespread popularity of—and virtual demand for—“uplifting” Holocaust stories. These books represent what Horn calls “an astonishing proportion of what counts today as ‘Jewish’ literature in English.” She dismantles their disingenuous need to “teach us something beautiful about our shared and universal humanity, replete with epiphanies and moments of grace […] about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption.” Horn finds this “stupid,” “insulting,” and, finally, “hateful.”

None of this is fair to Jesse Eisenberg, of course. He’s much closer to the subject matter of A Real Pain than Spalding Gray was to Cambodia, and his Jewish identity has long been important to his life and art. Eisenberg’s first play, written nearly two decades ago, is about the Holocaust, and his script for A Real Pain was inspired by a Shoah survivor in his own ancestry. In the film, this survivor is transmuted into the grandmother of his character David and of his first cousin Benji (played by Kieran Culkin). The latter doted on her: she was his troubled spirit’s rock. As the film opens, she has recently died, leaving her grandsons a bequest to go on an organized tour of her Polish hometown, including the concentration camp on its outskirts where she was imprisoned—and one of its fortunate survivors.

Maybe I was suspicious partly because I was also a little bit jealous. A few years ago, like the characters in A Real Pain (and like Eisenberg himself), I went to the old country to see where my Jewish ancestors had come from. Mine emigrated decades before the Holocaust as part of the early 20th century’s mass migration of Jews from Eastern Europe, probably in flight from some combination of poverty and pogroms. (These miseries were closely interconnected, obviously.) They came from Romania—not Poland, like Eisenberg’s family. Still, hearing about A Real Pain, I couldn’t help thinking: This is my story; don’t take it away from me.

They came from Romania, but were they Romanians? I hardly ever said they were Jewish because I didn’t especially care. I was raised nonobservant in the American South. Well into my forties, I regarded the Jewish part of my heritage the way Primo Levi did his own when he was young—as “an almost negligible but curious fact, a small amusing anomaly.”

The day after I landed in Bucharest with my traveling companion (not my cousin but my wife, who is not Jewish: two other important differences between my story and Eisenberg’s), the full force of my heritage blindsided me. I’m healthy, fit, and seldom fall ill, but I was instantly beset by a debilitating myalgia—a real pain—that soon morphed into varying and shifting symptoms, afflicting me from my sinuses to my intestines. This illness corresponded to no set diagnosis, responded to neither rest nor treatment, and dogged me, along with immense fatigue and general brain fog, for the entire three weeks I spent in Romania.

My wife and I made our way up from Bucharest into Moldavia, my ancestral province, where Jews once flourished. During my great-grandparents’ formative years in the town of Dorohoi, Jews accounted for more than half of its roughly 12,000 inhabitants and congregated in two dozen synagogues. In 2019, when I visited, only one synagogue remained. The kindly 83-year-old man who showed us around it was one of a few dozen Jews still alive in the town, too few to form an active congregation. The synagogue was seldom used, he told us, although he did not need to. It was moldering, lifeless, with parts of it in such disarray that it looked less neglected than sacked. I saw my family’s surnames on an old memorial plaque. Instead of feeling comforted, I felt that what remained of my tribe and our history had simply been abandoned to gather dust, wither, dry up, and disappear.

“I want you to try to imagine what life was like [here] hundreds of years ago,” the tour guide in A Real Pain tells the group as he takes them through Lublin. “[P]icture a vibrant city,” he says, “little pieces of history frozen, peeking out, waiting for us.” These things were unimaginable to me in modern Moldavia, whose Jewish population today is just 10 percent of what it was on the eve of World War II. Only the scantest and most desolate traces remain. Few people, fewer stories, and the stories one finds tell of destruction and death. Instead of Jews’ contributions, only their oblivion. History not frozen in time but forgotten, forsaken. What began for me as nothing like a roots trip had now become one, intensely, painfully, as I visited place after place from which my roots had been ripped out—including, I came to understand, the deepest places inside me, which was why I was so sick.

We call this experience epigenetic trauma, and it can afflict us in mysterious ways. This trauma is at the heart of A Real Pain. The film’s central scene takes place at a Jewish (or “Jewish”) themed restaurant in Lublin where the assembled tour group is having dinner together after a day of sightseeing. The neurotic and socially awkward David has inadvertently offended his cousin—Benji is a classic example of the so-called “free spirit” who is in fact living in deep emotional bondage—by unintentionally revealing that Benji lives in his mother’s basement, where he is usually stoned. Benji gracelessly excuses himself from the table to go to the toilet. “He’s tormented, for whatever reason,” one of the other tourmates says after he leaves. “He’s clearly in pain.”

David erupts into a jagged monologue about that tormenting pain and its source. “[L]ook at what happened to our families. Look where we came from […] who isn’t wrought?” he cries.

I […] take a pill for my fuckin’ OCD, you know, and I jog, and I meditate, and I go to work in the morning and I […] come home at the end of the day. And I, like, move forward, you know, because I know that my pain is unexceptional so I don’t feel the need to […] burden everybody with it!

David’s self-medication and self-limiting stand in stark contrast to Benji’s emotionally extroverted, publicly burdensome way of dealing with the pain they’ve inherited from their grandmother. David blurts out: “[H]ow did this guy come from the survivors of this place? […] [H]ow did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?!” The grandchild of a Holocaust survivor is a suicide survivor.

How real is the pain? In her 2022 book Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, Maud Newton discusses a highly publicized and controversial study of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, which seemed to suggest that “epigenetic changes stemming from trauma could be passed down through multiple generations.” Many objections flew from the scientific community, including, as Newton notes, the study’s lack of “a control for environmental factors, such as the children hearing stories of the Holocaust, and their grandparents’ experiences, while they were growing up.” Maybe our pain comes from what we heard from them, not from what they experienced before we were born. But my great-grandparents, after they immigrated, categorically refused—as many immigrants do and have done—to talk about their lives before coming to the United States. No one in our family ever heard a word about Romania. The unshakable sense I had about my illness—that their suppressed suffering exploded into my body as I sojourned in their birthplace—indicated a connection, as Newton notes of the Holocaust survivor study, “that many of us feel we have in some way intuited.”

One of the few extant Jewish traces in my great-grandparents’ hometown is a Hebrew cemetery overgrown with weeds, wedged uncomfortably between houses in a modest residential neighborhood. My wife and I tried to go to the cemetery, but the lane that led to it was barred by an almost comically outsize roadblock, almost as though Romania was laughing at my pitiable effort to lay claim to my roots in its soil. Sick, weak, exhausted, and demoralized, I dropped to the ground where my own jagged monologue spilled out in my head: This is not my country. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere! And I realized that I had felt this way since my early youth—an unarticulated dislocation, a restlessness, and the paradoxical experience of feeling comfortable anywhere but at home nowhere.

Pauline Kael’s accusation that Spalding Gray “thinks like an actor” is arguably true of Eisenberg in at least one sense: A Real Pain has the feel of a stage play as much as a movie, dominated by dialogue-heavy scenes that give the cast, especially Eisenberg and Culkin (who have earned numerous major awards and nominations, most recently BAFTAs for Culkin’s flamboyant performance and Eisenberg’s screenplay), ample room to build the story through their words, facial expressions, gestures, and body language. Eisenberg’s reliance on the conventions of live theater makes the film’s final moments all the more arresting. Early on, we encountered Benji in JFK Airport, waiting for David to arrive for their flight to Poland. On returning to the US (an echo of their forebears’ immigration), Benji declines David’s invitation to come to dinner at his place in Manhattan. He won’t even share David’s cab to Penn Station, telling his cousin that he likes airports: “You meet the craziest people.” Especially if you are one of them.

David, up to here with his cousin’s evasions and delusions, smacks him in the face. It’s his attempt to reenact the treatment their grandmother had given the wayward Benji years earlier, when he needed a strong life correction. Her wake-up call worked then, but David’s doesn’t now. The moment passes into an ellipsis of rueful comedy. A Real Pain is not a feel-good movie after all. The final shot is a close-up of Benji sitting on the bench where we first saw him, his face at once blank, expectant, and vulnerable. There in JFK, that massive but liminal locus of international migration, he is an exemplar of the rootless cosmopolitan Jew, comfortable anywhere, at home nowhere. The film’s title appears beside his face: A REAL PAIN. It’s both a wry joke—the selfish, temperamental, needy Benji truly merits the label—and a gentle but explicit restatement of Eisenberg’s epigenetic thesis.

It’s a marvelous ending—because it isn’t one. The journey has ended but the pain has not, and neither has the arc of the story. We can feel that something has changed, but it is not clear exactly what that change is. The cousins have reunited but parted again, and they are not reconciled; their future relationship seems assured but its quality uncertain. We have not been uplifted. Nothing has been resolved. Life will go on as it had gone on before the trip. David gets in his cab and moves forward, but only to resume his same old wrought but unexceptional life. Benji sits still, but only to extend his ungrounded limbo.

A Real Pain’s unfinished ending is perhaps the most Jewish thing about the film. In “Fictional Dead Jews,” Horn debunks legendary literary critic Frank Kermode’s famous theory of the “sense of an ending.” What Kermode calls the universal “desire for consonance,” Horn argues, “isn’t universal at all”; it’s a strictly Christian insistence on salvation and epiphany. Authentic Jewish stories, she says, are “without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience.” Eisenberg understands this. While Benji languishes in the airport, David’s cab ride home takes him by Machpelah Cemetery in Queens: “All this Jewish history right next door,” Eisenberg’s screenplay observes, “upward mobility and death, the cycle. David takes it all in, a part of it all.”

Coincidentally, two of my great-grandparents—on my father’s side of the family, not my mother’s—are buried in a Jewish cemetery directly across the street from Machpelah, called Mount Carmel. Our flight home landed at JFK, where I found myself just as suddenly and mysteriously well as I had fallen ill on arriving in Romania. We had a week’s stay planned in the city, house-sitting for a friend on vacation, and my first order of business was to visit my great-grandparents’ graves. I had never done this, not even during the five years when I lived in New York in my early adulthood. The trip to Romania had ended, but the search for my ancestral soil had not.

My great-grandfather was a cantor and composer of some little repute; his sheet music is in the collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage. His ample headstone was easy to spot at Mount Carmel, given elevated pride of place in the burial grounds of his Upper West Side congregation. But there was no footstone for my great-grandmother, whom I knew to be buried here—or thought I knew. We called the cemetery office and were told that she was. Her footstone had probably sunk under the grass, they explained; the congregation had lagged on its dues. I dropped to the ground and started scrabbling with my bare hands, pulling out chunks of earth, digging for roots.