I've written elsewhere on this site, including in my review for the fantastic Zone of Interest (2024) and my capstone project for the program, about the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics. Through FASPE, I spent two weeks this year in Berlin and Poland visiting key sites of Nazi history and reflecting on the role of professionals in the Holocaust. Although I'm not Jewish, the experience was singularly impactful. I know that other programs exist to accomplish its goal of forcing reflection and reintroducing people, especially young people, to the trials and tribulations their ancestors went through. A quick Google search finds "heritage tours", especially through Poland, on offer from any number of Jewish organizations. 

Because of the weighty experiences these programs offer – and their insistence (however explicit or implicit) on participants' engagement with questions of evil, tragedy, ancestry, and the meanings of life – such journeys lend good material to a movie. Jesse Eisenberg takes a swing at one in A Real Pain, his second directorial outing since 2022's tepidly-received When You Finish Saving the World. And it connects, with Eisenberg starring alongside Kieran Culkin as cousins who, despite growing apart in adulthood, are reconnecting on a heritage trip through Poland after the death of their shared grandmother. But beyond just giving audiences the undoubtedly valuable taste of the challenging experience of being on one of these trips, the film's two protagonists and wider tour group mostly retread solid but familiar ground.

Director Eisenberg introduces us to main character David Kaplan (played by actor Eisenberg) with a brilliant opening credit sequence in which David leaves voicemails, with increasingly anxious urgency, for his brother Benji (Culkin) about a flight they're taking together from New York to Warsaw. From the raising panic in his voice it's clear David expects Benji to miss the flight, especially given his immature nonresponse. But when David arrives at JFK, Benji reveals he's been there for hours, calmly oblivious to the calls piling up on his cell. He offers David a snack of warm yogurt instead of buying food at the airport – underscoring the men's different levels of financial health – and insinuates he's bringing weed with him on the international flight. David's confusion and horror suggests their different lifestyles and sensitivity to risk. These first 15 minutes lay an economical groundwork for the fast, 90-minute runtime.

Arriving in Poland, they're already late to group introductions with their heritage tour guide and fellow travelers. Will Sharpe gently plays James, the guide; an academic who's not Jewish, James is clearly knowledgeable yet struggles slightly with connecting to the trauma his Jewish participants are experiencing. The rest of the group is all Jewish: wealthy coastal elite Marcia (Jennifer Grey), Rwandan genocide survivor and convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), and middle-aged couple Diane and Mark (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskas). It's immediately clear Culkin's Benji is the outlier; he interjects during the travelers' introductions, is far more emotionally raw, and overshares at every opportunity. But the group seems to love him for it, even though David is annoyed. An early illustration comes when Benji suggests taking a photo with a Polish war memorial, which David says seems disrespectful to history. Benji disagrees, arguing that this kind of engagement with history, however silly, is the only way it stays alive; one by one, every member of the group is sold on Benji's vision and joins in the photoshoot, including James. David is left, alone, to take the photos.

The "road movie" journey continues relatively formulaically. David and Benji remain tense, which we learn is the result of past personal tragedies and the two paths they've taken, diverging, in life. While there's no question David is too uptight, Benji's antics do get more and more grating, repeatedly taking up all the space in a scene. The two butt heads, retreat, butt heads again. Benji relies heavily on affirmations and other therapy-speak which, to this east coaster's ears, really got old fast. Meanwhile, other tourgoers occasionally speak up but are mostly wallflowers, to the detriment of the film; while it allows us to know David and Benji very well, and their relationship and family history is no doubt the crux of the movie, more voices would have improved the emotional depth and offered different and nuanced interpretations of the tragedy of the Holocaust and how modern people engage with it. The supporting cast's insights and stories, such as Eloge's thoughtfulness as the newest member of the Tribe (and the only one who's seen a genocide firsthand), are some of the film's most memorable parts.

Moments when A Real Pain pauses the rapid-fire Eisenberg-Culkin dialogue, and simply takes its audience on the heritage tour, are the others when it is most successful. After Benji blows up at James for intellectualizing Jewish death in the Holocaust, the film itself seems to take a more empathetic approach to what we're watching, and the day we spend with the characters in Majdanek concentration camp allows the audience to take in (on their own terms) one of the best-preserved examples of German genocide of Jews. I found myself choking up during the camp visit, and afterwards, especially with shots accented by a delicate and skillful score from pieces by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. 

However, most of my emotional engagement with the movie came from my own experiences traveling to Poland through FASPE; in the same vein, my girlfriend's emotional engagement with the movie (in the form of some tears walking out of the theater) came from thinking about her family's story as Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust. These reactions are testaments not to the script and performances of a skillful film, per se, but its evocation of one of the worst events of human history. In fact, David and Benji's story, while sympathetic and challenging in its own right, often feels overshadowed by the history with which they are contending.

Ultimately, A Real Pain draws upon extremely difficult history – that only happened 80 years ago! – to evaluate our challenging and idiosyncratic relationships of the present. It mostly succeeds, driven by some great performances, a tight script, and thought-provoking shots of Jewish Poland; but too close a microscope on two (very annoying) men loses the nuance that a longer, more contemplative film could have achieved.