Jesse Eisenberg tends to play guys who are brainy, neurotic, and intensely sympathetic. In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post about his latest movie, A Real Pain, it became clear that he fits that description in real life.
A Real Pain, which Eisenberg wrote, directed, and starred in, opens throughout Israel next week and is being shown at the Haifa International Film Festival starting on January 4.
It’s a complex and funny road-trip movie about two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who go on a tour in Poland to visit the sites of their Holocaust survivor grandmother’s youth. David is a tense, self-conscious type, a family man with a sensible career, while Benji is wildly charming but also deeply tormented.
As they travel with a diverse group of fellow tourists also interested in seeing sites of Jewish-Polish interest, they begin to understand their past and themselves.
The movie is nominated for four Golden Globes and is generating quite a bit of Oscar buzz. This is the second movie that Eisenberg, 41, has directed. His first film, When You Finish Saving the World, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago.
He has had a long and successful career as an actor and is probably best known for his Oscar-nominated performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. He alternates between roles in high-profile studio movies, like Lex Luthor in various DC Comics movies, and indie films, including The Squid and the Whale and Roger Dodger. In 2020, he played Jewish mime Marcel Marceau in the World War II-era drama Resistance.
Eisenberg grew up in New Jersey, and his family originally came to the US from Poland and Ukraine. He took a trip to Poland in 2008 with his wife to visit surviving relatives and see sites that commemorate the history of Polish Jews, but he didn’t get the idea for the story he tells in his latest film until a couple of years ago.
While the movie isn’t autobiographical, he acknowledged that aspects of the characters are based on him, “Not in the biographical sense, not in the biographical details, but the way they speak is a manifestation of my own thoughts in my head, I guess.”
Eisenberg's inspiration
HE CAME up with the idea of two characters, one seemingly controlled and the other whose life is more chaotic and tried his hand at writing a script about them taking a trip.
“I had a bad movie I was writing about these two characters going to Mongolia, and I was about 30 pages into it when I realized it wasn’t working,” he said. Inspiration for how to rework the screenplay came to him when he was online one day and an ad for a tour of Holocaust sites popped up on his screen.
“It’s something I had thought about before, but it hadn’t occurred to me while I was writing this script until I saw that ad that this kind of historical trauma tourism is really a fascinating thing to explore in fiction and because it just speaks to the well-meaning but awkward ways we try to connect to our history.”
Once he decided to send Benji and David to Poland, he knew this was the right way to tell their story.
“These are characters who are going through interpersonal strife, and then it’s set against the backdrop of historical trauma, and they’re trying both to reconnect to their past with each other and to reconnect to their family’s past and so this particular storyline gave me a richly textured theme to work with.”
Musing about the cousins’ strong bond and how neither fits so neatly into the stereotype they seem to embody at first glance, he said, “My character has the enviable stability of a job and a family, and yet when he’s with his cousin, he immediately feels like he’s six years old and a loser again.
“And Benji, by contrast, seems to be the most in control, charming, happy-go-lucky one, but as we slowly start to learn, he’s actually suffering a lot more than David, and David, for his part, can’t stand that Benji is suffering because David thinks, ‘If I had 1% of your charm, I would be thrilled; I would win life.’”
Kieran Culkin as Benji has the showier role and gets most of the best lines, but Eisenberg chose to play the more low-key David.
“I had the thought that I should play that role [Benji] because it’s the more fun role to play for an actor. One of our producers is Emma Stone, and she thought that it would really be a mistake to try to be directing while trying to play a character that is so unhinged and spontaneous just because it would be such separate parts of my brain during the day.”
MUCH OF the movie is very funny, but Eisenberg said the comedy came naturally out of the cousins’ relationship.
“Benji’s behavior and unpredictable running commentary are really funny because he’s smart, but he’s not filtered, and so putting a character like that with a character like me who’s filtered to a fault is just a funny dynamic.
Then when you put that in a group, especially a loquacious group like the one in the movie, you end up seeing funny interpersonal dynamics, but it’s just the way that I view the world.”
Filming in Poland turned out to be a positive experience, and Eisenberg has since applied for Polish citizenship and currently has an ID number but has not yet received his passport.
“It’s not just that I had a great experience with the crew; it’s that we were working in locations and on historical sites that are being maintained by non-Jews.
So, for example, the Majdanek concentration camp [site] is run by young, non-Jewish academics who are really brilliant people who could probably work anywhere they want, and yet they’ve chosen to spend their lives driving to a concentration camp every day to memorialize Jewish history that occurred there.”
In one town where his family lived, he met someone who knew his family history and actually shared photographs of Eisenberg’s family. “My experience in Poland was one of overwhelming gratitude to people who spend their lives honoring the history of my family and families like mine.”
Eisenberg’s expression of gratitude for the Poles he met seemed to lift his mood, and I got the sense that, despite his success, he has to fight a tendency towards depression. He agreed.
“It’s something that I think about all the time because I feel simultaneously very lucky in my life, but I’m also a depressive, and so I’m constantly wondering why do I feel anything except elation for the good fortune that I’ve been blessed with?
“So when I think about that, it makes me think of the past, and it makes me think of my ancestors or my forebears, rather, who had such difficult lives, and I start feeling guilty that I feel miserable, and it creates an interesting psychological pattern that I thought I could explore in an entertaining way in this movie.”