A REAL PAIN, Holocaust Tourism & Gaza – Essay by Yael Friedman (Guest Post)
Among the disappointments in this year’s Oscars was that the original screenplay award didn’t go to A Real Pain, which was head and shoulders above the rest in its category. I blame the trailer industry for my initial resistance to seeing A Real Pain. It spun the movie into the kind of “quirky” buddy + Holocaust movie I would avoid at all costs – a sizzle reel of punchlines and poignancy. I dreaded seeing it and also knew I had to, at least as homework. Friends told me it was great and I just assumed they were wrong. But it was wonderful.
Somehow the backdrop of a Jewish roots/Holocaust tour of Poland didn’t even feel contrived or “ugh not again” (“Never Again” pun not intended). I’m not bemoaning the “Holocaust movie” – there will always be innumerable ways to portray the Holocaust’s seemingly infinite facets and insights into history and human nature. I’m also not criticizing Holocaust tours – there is really no substitute for having a concrete connection with history, whether one’s own or that of others.
Years ago, I finally visited Ireland, after a near lifetime of being engrossed in its history. I knew about the Famine, I’d read so much about the North and the Troubles, and yet it wasn’t until I actually walked through empty countrysides with overgrown Famine Cottages, and hiked the small hills of West Belfast amid the murals and “peace line” barriers, that I could internalize any of it. And when I finally visited Auschwitz — reluctantly, because I felt like really what was there left for me to uncover, in history or within myself — it affected me so viscerally; I realized there is no substitute for that, no text or even survivor testimony that can so quickly plunge you into what that place was.
A Real Pain utilizes this familiar tourist trip as a convincing canvas. Nailing down the charmingly Bohemian Benji (Kieran Culkin) by booking a conventional tour by the more conventional cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg), made sense. It was a perfect vehicle for allowing their dynamics, personalities, the themes of memory and trauma tourism, to unfold. The exposition in this screenplay was a master class, even if both actors played versions of themselves, or because of it. Use what you have, it’s a neat sleight of hand to turn a character you think you know into one entirely invented. As fun as Benji was, as delightful to the rest of the tour group, as envious as the more straitlaced and neurotic David got (as you could tell he has all his life) the tragedy of Benji’s character pierced deeply. He endeared and broke and enraged you in equal measure. We never really find out why Benji has been cast adrift in life, and we don’t need to. We meet him where he is and worry for what is next. Just enough is given to make it real and utterly palpable. And the flatter more two-dimensional secondary characters seemed intended to be that way, drawn to serve as foils. They form discrete parts of that trip as much as the sites themselves. Continue reading on THE FEMALE GAZE.
ABOUT YAEL FRIEDMAN
Yael Friedman is a journalist based in New York. She covers art and culture and their intersection with economics, politics, and history. She has written extensively about urban history and urban planning, particularly New York’s, analyzing its past and assessing its present and future. Her articles have appeared in Bloomberg CityLab, 1843, The Conversationalist, The Economist, The Daily Beast, Haaretz, Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Urban Omnibus.
