Jan 13, 2025
“What are they gonna do?” asks Benji Kaplan while walking through the airport, “Arrest two Jews for a bit of weed? That’s not a good look for Poland.” A Real Pain, released November 1 2024, follows cousins David and Benji Kaplan’s visit to Poland to fulfill their grandmother’s dying wish that they see the home she grew up in. David, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who also directed the film, is an uptight and nervous do-gooder. Naturally, it is David who planned the trip. Benji, played by Kieran Culkin, meanwhile embodies the opposite energy—he is laid back, says what’s on his mind, and makes decisions based on his emotions. Benji even ships a package of marijuana to their hotel in Poland to ensure the cousins have a good time. The film, based on Jesse Eisenberg’s real-life experiences, 1 1 Hornick, Susan. “A Real Pain: A Conversation with Jesse Eisenberg.” aish. Published: November 5, 2024. https://aish.com/a-real-pain-a... plays with stereotypes held by North American Jews towards Poland, making light of cultural and linguistic tensions throughout David and Benji’s trip through Poland.
The film joins other films of the “return genre”, including popular, mainstream films such as Everything is Illuminated (2005) staring Elijah Wood, adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel and Treasure (2024) starring Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek (her father and a Holocaust survivor), shown in cinemas across the United States. The theme of returning to Poland to explore one’s Jewish roots has been previously explored in indie films which reached smaller audiences such as Adam Zucker’s documentary film The Return: A film about being young and Jewish in Poland today (2014), which follows four Polish women in their searches for their Jewishness; Katka Reszke and Slawomir Grunberg’s documentary Shimon’s Returns (2014), which follows a Holocaust survivor, Shimon Redlich, who revisits his hometown as well as locations he hid during the war; as well as Yael Bartana’s film And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007-2011), a fantastic exploration of what a welcome Jewish return to Poland might look like. However, unlike the films listed above, A Real Pain is less about Poland or Jewishness than it is about the two characters’ contrasting personalities and approaches to the experience of heritage tourism.
While sitting at a restaurant at Plac Grzybowski [Grzybowski Square], eating what looks like żurek, a traditional Polish soup with a fermented wheat base, featuring slices of pork sausage and boiled egg, David looks at Benji and says, “Weird soup, eh?” To which Benji responds, “I fucking love it.” In this moment, the cousins’ attitudes towards their trip in Poland become apparent—David is embarking on this trip out of duty to his grandmother and to his cousin, while Benji is there to experience something more.
David and Benji join an organized tour group led by James, a guide from the United Kingdom, with a group of individuals Benji boldly (and awkwardly) describes as “geriatric” upon meeting them. Together, they visit the POLIN Museum of the History of the Polish Jews (which had its grand opening in 2014), the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (completed in 1948), and the Warsaw Uprising Monument (unveiled in 1989) before continuing to Lublin where they visit the iconic Grodzka Gate, which once marked entry into the Jewish sector of the city. Today, the Grodzka Gate Centre serves as a cultural institution, creating and maintaining exhibitions in the building above the gate. But it is unclear if the group goes inside either POLIN Museum or Grodzka Gate, or if they just pass through. Their approach to the Grodzka Gate features the Lublin Castle in the background, marking an emphatic passage from the Christian side to the Jewish side of the city. They do not visit the famous Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, founded in 1930 by Rabbi Yehuda Meir Shapiro—a famous Hasidic rabbi and the former Chief Rabbi of Lublin. They go on to visit the Majdanek Concentration Camp, which the cousins note is eerily close to the town. In one scene as they walk through Majdanek, the Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom at Majdanek serves as their backdrop. But the viewer of the film cannot hear the tour guide, as this is not a documentary about post-Holocaust Poland, nor is it a film about the Holocaust—even as the British tour guide mutters some brief facts about the concentration camp as the group begins to walk through it.
The film’s themes come into focus in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Lublin when Benji becomes frustrated by James and his tour. Benji expresses that James’ constant deluge of facts prevents any real interaction with the place they’re in. Benji suggests each person in the group place a stone on the oldest grave in the cemetery, that of Talmudist Yaakov Kopelman haLevi. Back at the hotel, Benji approaches James with feedback, highlighting how the group didn’t interact with any Polish people and wasn’t given the opportunity to do so. The rehearsed and routine nature of the tour didn’t satisfy Benji’s goals. David, meanwhile, stands to the side, looking uncomfortable — as he does during all of Benji’s interventions.
In her book Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press, 2013), Erica Lehrer outlines two modes of tourism to Poland—“the mission,” which can be characterized as employing “a conventional, distancing, and generalized stance toward Poland, in large part enacting a disavowal of the country as anything but a site of tragedy for the Jews” and “the quest,” which can be characterized by feelings of “absence, fragmentation, cultural displacement, and longings for a living connection to the intimate past, a sense of being at home in the world, of positive connection to other-cultural neighbors—perhaps more enduring if less acute wounds of the Holocaust.” 2 2 Lehrer, Erica. Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press, 2013). Pg. 93. Benji’s interventions in the mission-style tour that David signed up for are indicative of his quest for something more. The tour that James gives highlights Jewish absence, moving the group from monument to monument, while Benji intervenes and insists on real connections—placing stones on the grave, longing to meet Poles. A Real Pain, therefore, is a critique of heritage tourism, forcing questions to the surface such as: What can be gained from a premeditated group tour through Poland’s Holocaust sites? How can one experience something real and meaningful during such an experience?
I admit that my own exploration of Lublin and Majdanek happened on such a tour, but the most meaningful moments of the tour happened when I strayed off-course—like when the custodian of the Chachmei Yeshiva (then Hotel Ilan where we were staying) showed some of us the synagogue after-hours and gave us the keys to the cemetery, telling us which tombstones to pay special attention to. Of course, the overwhelming majority of the time I have spent in Poland over many summers as a researcher, a student of Yiddish, an intern at Polin Museum, and as a Polish-Canadian with family in Poland was spent outside of such a planned group, guided by my own curiosity and longing for a connection to the past.
David and Benji peel off from the group in Lublin, where they travel to the home their grandmother grew up in. Somewhere along the way another binary between the two cousins becomes apparent—Benji had a close relationship with their grandmother while David did not. Benji speaks intimately of their grandmother while David takes it in. They decide they also want to leave stones on the doorstep of the house, and stand back to absorb the completion of their mission. Shortly, a Polish man begins to yell at them, explaining in Polish that an old woman lives there and that she will surely trip over the trap they have set for her, only they don’t understand his Polish, and soon his son comes out and explains his father’s concerns in broken English. Their mission has come to an unsatisfying conclusion.
The film was ultimately character-driven, concerned with contrasting David and Benji—their different approaches to life and different ways of seeing the world. David has hit major milestones in life associated with success—he has a career, a wife, and a child—while Benji lives in his mother’s basement and seems to be without direction. Yet, through the vehicle of their trip to Poland, we see the value in the qualities Benji has that David lacks—a very deep connection to their grandmother and a curiosity about the past and its connection with the present. It is Benji who is keen on honoring the dead in the cemetery and through this trip in memory of their grandmother, while David embarks on the trip out of a sense of obligation as though it is another task to check off his list of accomplishments. Benji, both on the trip and it seems in life, is embarking on a quest acknowledging “absence, fragmentation, cultural displacement.” 3 3 Lehrer, Erica. Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press, 2013). Pg. 93. Poland—including all of the important Jewish historical landmarks I’ve mentioned—is a mere backdrop to the tensions of David and Benji’s relationship in A Real Pain.
Though this film squarely fits into the growing genre of films about the return of Jews to Poland, its engine is character, not history. The differences between the cousins are mapped onto differing approaches to heritage tourism—the mission (David) vs. the quest (Benji), and might lead us to ask: What do we, as individuals, seek to learn from our explorations of the past? How much is that related to how we understand the past itself and how much is it about our own personalities and approaches to life?
