‘A Real Pain’ is Jesse Eisenberg’s love letter to Poland, the country his family left under duress

In Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, a pair of American Jewish cousins on a heritage tour of Poland sneak back onto a train they already had tickets for, after getting off at the wrong stop.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” says Benji, played by Kieran Culkin. “We shouldn’t have to pay for tickets in Poland. This is our country.”

“No it’s not,” says David, played by Eisenberg. “It was our country. They kicked us out because they thought we were cheap.”

It is an exchange that encapsulates the mix of pathos, humor and fast-paced banter that Eisenberg brings to “A Real Pain,” which he wrote and directed in addition to stars in.

Eisenberg, 41, loosely based the script and characters on a composite of real people and experiences, including a 2008 visit with his now-wife to what was once his great-aunt’s house in Poland until 1939 — back when the Eisenbergs were still “Ajzenbergs.”

“I was at this house, I was standing in front of it, and I was expecting to feel something specific and revelatory, and nothing came,” Eisenberg said in a Zoom interview. “That feeling of emptiness kind of stayed with me for a long time. I was trying to diagnose the emptiness, and I was wondering: Is it because I’m an unfeeling person? Or is it because it’s really just impossible to connect to the past in an easy way, in a kind of external way?”

All these years later, “A Real Pain,” which hits theaters Friday, seeks to ask those questions, Eisenberg says: “How do we reconnect to the past? And how do our modern struggles connect to the struggles of our families?”

Eisenberg, best known for his cerebral, often neurotic turns in “The Social Network,” the FX limited series “Fleishman is in Trouble” and a number of Woody Allen films, has returned to the Holocaust as a subject in a number of projects. In 2013 he wrote and starred in “The Revisionist, an off-Broadway play about a Polish survivor of the Holocaust.” In 2020 he took part in a staged reading at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage of “The Investigation,” Peter Weiss’ documentary play about the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963-1965. That same year he played Marcel Marceau in “Resistance,” about the famed mime’s role in the French resistance.

As in “Treasure,” a movie released this year in which Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry star as a daughter and father who travel to Auschwitz, “A Real Pain” is about the main characters’ evolving relationship and about the legacy of the Holocaust on American Jews now two generations removed from the genocide.

In Benji and David Kaplan, viewers are introduced to two very different expressions of trauma: Benji feels everything and has no filter and an ability to get people to open up, while David is overly cautious, analytical and takes medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

They set out for Poland while reeling from the death of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, joining a tour group of adults much older than they are. The group is led by facts-obsessed guide James (Will Sharpe), and includes Marcia (Jennifer Grey), whose marriage recently fell apart, as well as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan).

Egyiawan’s character is based on a real person, Eloge Butera, who converted to Judaism because, Eisenberg said, “the only people he felt connected to were older Jewish people who could relate to the experience.” Eisenberg and Butera have stayed in touch since meeting at a wedding years ago, and Eisenberg said he had always thought Butera’s story made him an interesting model for a trip participant.

“As I was writing, of course, it occurred to me that it does this other thing, which is allow the audience to broaden out their perspective,” Eisenberg said from Indiana, wearing the same red Indiana University baseball cap his character wears throughout the film. (Eisenberg dropped out of Hebrew school in his native New York City but has recently begun attending a synagogue in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives with his family.)

He added, “It allows me to bring in other stories of trauma in a way that’s not kind of academic, but actually in the physical presence of this man who is a survivor.”

As the movie’s characters reckon with their personal and collective trauma, the main characters’ differences come into stark relief. Benji wisecracks his way across the brittle terrain, while David deals with a sense of guilt for ever having felt like his own problems were legitimate.

On a walk with the group, the cousins briefly imagine what their life would be like if the Holocaust didn’t happen. They would probably be religious Jews, Benji thinks, and have beards, and not touch women, according to traditional interpretations of Jewish law. Bottom line: They would likely still live in Poland.

That’s a scenario with some appeal for Eisenberg, who developed such an affection for the country while filming there that he decided to seek citizenship, an option often available to descendants of Polish Holocaust survivors. He will become a citizen this month and formally mark the occasion at the Polish embassy in Washington, D.C., which will also screen the film.

“I think of myself as a New Yorker through and through, because I go to Broadway shows and I was born here, but the reality of my lineage is that we were Polish for a lot longer,” Eisenberg said. “There’s something so kind of sad about the way things can end so abruptly and be forgotten so abruptly, because to remember was so painful, because of the war and because so many people were killed. And so the way I think about it is I’m trying to reconnect.”

Filming in Poland, Eisenberg said, allowed him to experience the generosity of the people living there who worked to tell his family’s story and preserve the memory of the Holocaust, defying his expectations of contemporary Polish cultural attitudes toward the Holocaust.

In 2018, the Polish government, led by the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice Party, passed a law criminalizing speech blaming Poland for crimes committed by the Nazis, part of a broad effort to demand pride in Polish history. (The party was ousted from power last year.) The law created a chilling effect for some stewards of Holocaust history, curbing a public reckoning about the degree to which Poles collaborated with the Nazis.

The crackdown on “unpatriotic” accounts of Polish history also caused a shakeup at the Polin Museum, Poland’s national Jewish museum, where “A Real Pain” had its international premiere in May. A museum leader was pushed out when he sought to stage an exhibit about a wave of antisemitic persecution in 1968. When the museum recently marked its first decade, Eisenberg spoke virtually at the gala.

Eisenberg said the political tensions over Holocaust memory did not encroach on him as he filmed on location, including at the interior of the Majdanek concentration camp, which remains remarkably preserved.

“I’m aware of it in a kind of intellectual way, but my experience there was just the exact opposite,” he said. “I was working with a crew of 150 people who were all eager and working their asses off to try to make my personal family story come to life.”

In gaining permission to film at Majdanek, Eisenberg said he benefited from telling a story that is rooted firmly in the present, even though the camp uniquely lends itself to filmmaking set in the past because it remains in roughly the same condition as it was in when the Nazis operated it.

“A few things were in our favor: Most movies want to shoot in Majdanek, and they want to turn it into 1942 Auschwitz, and they want to have 100 extras in Nazi uniforms running around with guns. We were trying to do the opposite,” Eisenberg said. “What we were trying to do was depict Majdanek as it is now as a tourist site, in an attempt to do the exact thing Majdanek is trying to do itself, which is to try to bring awareness to this, to the horrors that occurred on these grounds.”

He said he had ended up becoming close with a number of young scholars on the staff at the camp memorial. “Our relationship started off with suspicion,” Eisenberg recalled, “and wound up as a beautiful meeting of the minds.”

Eisenberg said he believed that collaborating with others around his age — removed by generations from direct connection with the Holocaust — enabled “A Real Pain” to channel a fresh approach to grappling with the past.

“I’m in a younger generation,” he said. “I have enough distance to go to Poland … and not feel the kind of visceral memories of pain, but going there with an open heart and mind and meeting people who I love and who are contemporaries and friends and who are working to make the world a better place.”