A Real Pain

    As writer, director and star Jessie Eisenberg has a real winner in this comedy about second-generation American Holocaust trauma.

    Honest. It is funny. 

    But it’s also trenchantly sad. The real pain is representatively borne by two (relatively) safe American cousins. They bear the burden of their grandparents’ generation’s suffering. And as contemporary Judaism only too well knows: the global antisemitism that propelled the first Holocaust looms again. That historic meaning in the title trumps its reference to the two cousins.

    Consider how we find and leave the central duo. Benji (Kieran Culkin) hangs out at the airport. He initially waits for cousin David (Eisenberg), who urgently streams phone messages about his arrival. At the end Benji spurns David’s home dinner to stay there. “You meet the craziest people here.” That’s the in-transit class, unsettled, uncentered, in between, having lost one’s tether..

    Benji is one. The last shot leaves him teary-eyed, alone, softened by the contagion of grief. After his harrowing exposure to the Holocaust site, Benji remains alone, of a persecuted people without the effective supports ceded the “normal.” Like the Beckett Unnameable: he must go on; he can’t go on; e hgoes on.

    Benji nakedly wears the moral compass that in post-Holocaust (or is it pre-Holocaust 2?) America is out of fashion. He skips out on the $12 Polish train ticket  because ”It’s the principle of paying. We shouldn't have to pay for train tickets in Poland. This is our country.” “No,” properly responds David: “it's not. It was our country. They kicked us out 'cause they thought we were cheap.” Since the Holocaust the old line between truth and falsehood has been blurred. 

    So too Benji’s wistful outlaw spirit: “We stay moving, we stay light, we stay agile.” But in life Benji carries the burden of the Survivor conscience. His grandmother lived through it, but both cousins remain branded by it.

Benji’s ethic seems contemporary cliche: ”Man, what's stupid is the corporatization of travel. Ensuring that the rich move around the world, propagate their elitist loins, while the poor stay cut off from society.” And to Marcia: “Money's like fucking heroin for boring people.”

But that formulaic morality is here validated by the shadow that still falls across our present culture: “We're on a fucking Holocaust tour. If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don't know what to tell you, man.” As the Somali Jew Eloge adds, “Ignoring the proverbial slaughterhouse to enjoy the steak, as it were.” Behind the smile still gleams the skull.

In disclosing Benji’s suicide attempt, David reveals a strength behind his apparent weakness: “our grandma survived by a thousand miracles when the entire world was trying to kill her, you know?... like, how did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?” 

But as the ostensibly stabler David explains Benji’s climactic dinner explosion, he admits his own weakness: “I just, like, 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, like, 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, like, I don't know, burden everybody with it, you know?” Both modern young Jews still bear their grandparents' pain.

That scene ends with that same broken Benji very charmingly playing “Tea for Two” on the lounge piano. The tea is the cousins’ confession. 

Later Benji recalls David’s fragility: “You are, like, an awesome guy stuck inside the body of somebody who's always running late. And I gotta, like, fish that fuckin' guy outta ya every time I see ya.” Where once Benji “used to fucking cry about everything, man. Like…” now he is the modest modern American success story. Well, “survivor” story. He has a pretty wife and a beautiful baby son at home — and a successful career selling online banner advertising. Another salesman ripe for death.

The cousins are forbidden to leave their memorial stones on their grandmother’s front stoop. David has a home, with a stoop, where he can put his stone. Benji has none so, alone in the airport, he wears it inside. 

Despite Benji’s feeling neglected David does “give a shit about you. I just don't understand how you would ever do anything so fucking stupid to yourself.” The image of the suicidal Benji burns into David’s mind like the holocaust images, searing and immediate: ”I, like... I walk around with, like, this terrible fucking image of you in my head…’

The living remain frozen by their memory of their dead, themselves not fully alive either.