In summer 2023, Queens Jewish native and Oscar-nominee Jesse Eisenberg traveled to Poland, but not for a leisure trip. He set out to manifest his dream film project, which he spent steadfastly preparing over the last 15 years. Delving deep into the depths of his proud Jewish-Polish heritage, Eisenberg co-produced, wrote, starred, and directed A Real Pain, a fictional picture set in the modern backdrop of the Central European country that, like its title suggests, elicits “real pain” – both in its historical scope and in confronting human foibles. Eisenberg and co-star Kieran Culkin portray mismatched cousins – David and Benji – who together join a heritage tour throughout Poland after the loss of their grandmother, Dora. As part of her will, Dora implores her grandsons to visit the country’s historical touchstone locales.
A Real Pain made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20 – and within hours after its screening ended, it was acquired by Searchlight Pictures for $10 million.
Though raised in New Jersey, Jesse Eisenberg was born in Bayside, Queens, and attended The New School in Manhattan, where he majored in liberal arts with a focus on democracy and cultural pluralism. Around the time of his breakout role as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s The Social Network, Eisenberg portrayed a chasidic youth in Kevin Asche’s Holy Rollers. To prepare for that role, Eisenberg blended into the chasidic community of Brooklyn’s Boro Park.
“On the one hand, you think you can probably relate to [the chasidic community] because you come from the same background, and then there’s the added strange part of being associated with them by virtue of having the same religion. But I don’t feel any kinship with their day-to-day experience. So, I was really interested in learning about that,” Eisenberg told The Jewish Chronicle at the time of the film’s release, where he also revealed that he was raised mostly in a secular home. “The day after I read the script, I went to Boro Park where a lot of chasidim are concentrated [and went to] see if I could realistically play this character. [Chabad] were so eager to give me a bar mitzvah that they didn’t mind that I only knew the basic prayers. They didn’t make me learn anything, and I didn’t get any checks from my grandmother,” he quipped.
Eisenberg was raised by his college professor father and a mother, who used a “drama-based platform to teach cultural sensitivity to young doctors.” “[My family] got away from my grandparents’ generation that came over from Poland. I went to Hebrew school but dropped out before I had a bar mitzvah,” he said. Eisenberg’s anthropology and contemporary architecture studies while a student at the New School bore fruit for the successful, diverse, and prodigious actor, playwright, and director of over two decades.
A Real Pain represents Eisenberg’s second film as a director.
“A lot of [A Real Pain] is based on my family’s personal history [and] we even filmed a scene at the little apartment my family fled from in 1938,” said Eisenberg, leading up to the film’s premiere at Sundance last week. “What makes the movie resonant for me is that [the two cousins’] complicated relationship is set against the backdrop of the history and drama of Eastern Europe and the Second World War. It kind of frames their personal troubles against a global perspective and allows me to explore the question of pain – specifically, how do we reconcile our contemporary struggles against the backdrop of historical trauma.”
Amir Bogen, a senior film and TV writer and critic at YnetNews, wrote effusively about the film in his review, after attending the screening at Sundance. Bogen wrote, in part, “With tenderness, sensitivity, and witty jokes, A Real Pain manages to say something significant about personal trauma and universal trauma, the relationship between them and the importance of emotion to keep the memory of the Holocaust in our everyday consciousness. In this respect, it is one of the most effective Holocaust films.”
“The backdrop of the plot is a story that so many of us share; through the Jewish people’s history, our families’ heritage and the personal struggle of dealing with trauma, by repressing and disconnecting from the past,” Bogen explained to Queens Jewish Link. “The film shows the importance of personal connections and feelings as a tool to remember and cope. This is the spirit of [Benji’s] character [played by Culkin] who seems to live a life of failure but insists on his genuine emotional experience of the past. Eisenberg’s character, David, [meanwhile,] is more stable with a boring but profitable job and a family. He clearly lacks the charisma of his cousin to live life fully and leave an [indelible] mark on the world. Living life to the fullest, while not giving up to danger and death, is his story as well, which he tries to avoid. [Repressing] it might work [fine] in a Manhattan office, but not during a Holocaust tour in Poland with his troubled cousin and with the memory of his ancestors.”
Eisenberg’s own family emanated from Krasnystaw, a historical city that lies 33 miles southeast of Lublin in eastern Poland. In 1940, the Nazis established a Jewish ghetto in the poorest part of the town, and by May 1942, it became a transit ghetto where Jews were brought on their way to Majdanek or to the Sobibor extermination camp. In both places, they were murdered within minutes of entering it. Some in the city were also sent to the Belzec extermination camp. According to Holocaust records, only 2,500 Jews from Krasnystaw would survive the war. Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, was shot on location in Warsaw, Radom-Sadkow Airport (near Warsaw), Lublin, and Krasnystaw. Pivotal scenes were also shot at the Mandragora Jewish Restaurant in the Old Town Lublin. During the six weeks shooting in Poland, many extras were called in from all over Poland, as the casting was organized by Warsaw’s Sceneria Acting Agency.
“It must be said that this was not Jesse’s first visit to Lublin. He had come here anonymously many times before, which he admitted at the meeting with us,” Beata Stepaniuk-Kusmierzak, the deputy cultural mayor of Lublin, told Queens Jewish Link. “[Eisenberg] also surprised us with his great knowledge of Lublin, its history, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants. Understandably, he was extremely involved in discovering the fate of his own family, all of which made him feel like a native Lubliner among us. At the same time, we were captivated by his modesty and childlike curiosity about people and places,” added the deputy mayor.
“The City of Lublin has a dedicated, in-house unit to cooperate with film crews, and it was the Lublin Film Fund that tried to support the production in such a way that it went according to plan,” continues Stepaniuk-Kusmierzak. “We also [did it] in such a way as to have as little impact as possible on the city to be able to function and [for] its inhabitants. We have very good experience in this respect, and each crew could [always] count on [our] professional support.”
Pivotal scenes in A Real Pain take place at Majdanek concentration camp. According to the film’s co-star Jennifer Grey, “It was the first time it was ever allowed for any narrative fiction movie to be shot at a concentration camp, and I think it was out of respect to Jesse’s vision. I had never been to a concentration camp. I was stunned by how little I felt when I went in, initially… I then became overwhelmed by a sorrow that I never experienced before or since. As a Jew and as a woman, and as a person, it’s a lot,” she told the media at Sundance.
Because of this massive acquisition deal with Searchlight Pictures, Eisenberg’s A Real Pain will launch the film later this year in theaters before going to stream on Hulu, and will partner under the Disney umbrella worldwide. “Making A Real Pain was a true labor of love,” said a gratified and grateful Eisenberg.
