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“I hate him. I want to be him.”
Two Jewish cousins, somewhat estranged but fond of each other, follow their grandmother’s wish in her will that—at her expense—they visit her home, the home she had in Poland before she escaped the Holocaust. The narrative would seem predictable. One imagines it unspooling in well-worn ways: cousins “get” each other emotionally, cousins are deeply moved by the Holocaust, cousins experience catharsis on seeing grandmother’s home.
Benji (Kieran Culkin) lives in his mother’s basement and smokes weed (the grandmother’s description of third-generation Holocaust survivors).
It's the strength of the script, written by Jesse Eisenberg, who also directed and stars in this small film, that it defies the genres it invokes. The cousins indeed are very different personalities, a set-up for anticipated conflict and later coming together. Conflict is apparent from the outset. David (Eisenberg) is an uptight, compulsive, rule-bound, married-with-children creator of those online banner ads everyone hates (“you lead a failed capitalist life,” his cousin concludes). Benji (Kieran Culkin) is a tormented free spirit, in turns charismatic, charming, and socially inappropriate, who lives in his mother’s basement and smokes weed (the grandmother’s description of third-generation Holocaust survivors). Their differences are displayed in early scenes. David, in a taxi on the way to the airport and running late, repeatedly calls Benji to update him on the taxi’s precise location. Benji, meanwhile, is sitting calmly in the airport, observing those around him, pointedly not on his phone. Can the two bond?
Benji's (Kieran Culkin, left) exuberance is sometimes merely tolerated by his cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg).
The 30-somethings fly to Warsaw, where they join a group of other, generally non-observant Jews (David has declared he doesn’t believe in God). They include a pragmatic older couple, originally from Eastern Europe, who never stop holding hands; Marcia, a woman whose husband recently left her (Jennifer Grey, a world apart from 1987’s “Dirty Dancing, set in a Jewish resort in the Catskills), and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a thoughtful Rwandan who has converted because he sees parallels in the Holocaust and his country’s genocide. The troop of 6 is led by James (Will Sharpe), a non-Jewish Asian-Britain.
Above, Benji (left, Culkin) and David (Eisenberg)
explore Warsaw's Jewish heritage together, yet apart.
When the group pauses to reflect on a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Benji encourages them to pose among the statues, to imagine themselves as participants in that moment. David indicates Benji’s proposal is inappropriate, even sacrilegious, but Benji, undeterred, soon has everyone involved—except David, who is left holding all the cell phones, the outsider taking photos of the others.
Incredibly, Eisenberg manages to de-center the Holocaust, even while filming in Poland and never avoiding that genocide.
The tour’s principal location is Lublin, once a thriving Jewish center, as we learn from what its buildings once housed: a Jewish bakery, a temple, a bookstore, an association. And the nearby Majdanek concentration camp, a prisoner-of-war facility and killing center, where at least 60,000 Jews were murdered. The tour of the camp is intense, with its former gas chambers and wall of shoes. James asks the 6 on the bus, as they travel back to their hotel, how the experience affected them. Most are quiet, into their own thoughts. “I was stricken,” says Eloge, “which is better than feeling nothing.” Benji is convulsed in tears, head in hands, true to his character. David attempts to comfort Benji, but seems more embarrassed by him than emotionally connected. No one experiences genuine catharsis. Incredibly, Eisenberg manages to de-center the Holocaust, even while filming in Poland and never avoiding that genocide.
During a dinner at an up-scale restaurant, evoking a pre-war Poland with a pianist playing Hava Nagila, a celebratory Jewish folk song, Benji disrupts the table with anti-social antics, perhaps emanating from discomfort with the moment’s kitsch, its inauthenticity, which he has a nose for sniffing out. After Benji leaves, David apologizes to the group but also “overshares”: “I love him. I hate him. I want to kill him. I want to be him.”
The tour group's visit to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin (above)
is mediated by their guide James's (Will Sharpe, far right) recitation of facts,
rather than participatory emotion.
The subsequent visit of the cousins to their beloved grandmother’s home is underwhelming. What they find contains so little of the grandmother’s spirit and life that had resided in their imaginations that they leave without so much as a photograph.
Culkin is magnificent as the spontaneous Benji. Although he can seem over-the-top and out of control, his character never approaches the one-dimensionality of his always-a-teenager Roman Roy in TV’s “Succession.” He even gets cautious David up on hotel rooftops (barging past alarmed exit doors), smoking pot. If this Pied Piper role can be played with nuance, Culkin has done it.
What could have been a cloying buddy film is something else.
What could have been a cloying buddy film, with Benji the extrovert/believer and David the introvert/non-believer coming together over the shared experience of the Holocaust, is something else. The “real pain” of the title is the pain of two cousins who care about each other and would like to deepen their relationship, but can’t. The Holocaust, decentered here in a courageous bit of filmmaking, is both too much—and not enough.
She says: Are we ready, as a culture, for de-centering the Holocaust? Maybe.
He says: The “culture” (what the majority of people in a given society believe and feel) may be ready for de-centering, but some, including Jews not represented in the film’s tour group—will find the idea reprehensible.
Date: 2024
Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Will Sharpe
Country: United States, filmed mostly in Poland, with support from many Polish entities
Language: English
Runtime: 90 minutes
Other Awards: 5 wins and 14 other nominations to date
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