Jesse Eisenberg speaks to Russell Baillie on his new Holocaust tourism dramedy
Warsaw packed: Cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) bring plenty of personal baggage to their getaway. Photo / supplied
It’s perhaps apt for someone acclaimed and Oscar-nominated for playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that Jesse Eisenberg’s next possible trip to the Academy Awards would involve something meta.
A Real Pain is Eisenberg’s second film as writer and director, and given its four Golden Globe nominations. it’s likely to figure in the Oscar race, too.
Eisenberg also stars in the self-referential comedy drama about two Jewish-American cousins on a Holocaust history tour in Poland.
Their trip takes them to the childhood home of their recently deceased grandmother Dory, a Holocaust survivor. The house used in the film was where Eisenberg’s own Aunt Doris had lived before the Holocaust.
A Real Pain is not his first work inspired by family history. In his 2013 off-Broadway play The Revisionist, Eisenberg played a self-absorbed American writer staying with his elderly Polish second cousin, a Holocaust survivor, played by Vanessa Redgrave.
He attempted a film adaptation but couldn’t make it work. But later, while working on a script about two American guys visiting Mongolia, an adaptation of one of his short stories, up popped an ad on his computer screen. “Auschwitz tours” it offered, “with lunch”.
It was a lightbulb moment. Sending the pair to Poland instead would be a better idea. It would give the story something to say. His play had contrasted the contemporary anxiety and self-centredness of the writer with the suffering of his forebears.
A Real Pain does that too, sort of, especially with the character of Benji, the temperamental cousin of Eisenberg’s steadier David. He’s played by Kieran Culkin, adding another outlandish motormouth after four seasons of playing Roman Roy in Succession.
His Benji becomes the life of the seven-strong tour party while David, a guy who sells online advertising, frets about his cousin’s impulsiveness. Their pilgrimage takes them to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland’s southeast, which Eisenberg the director delivers with dialogue-free scenes in what is otherwise a very chatty movie.
On a Zoom call to the Listener from Los Angeles, Eisenberg’s answers are delivered in the rapid-fire patter that has been a trademark of his characters in more than 40 films, including Zuckerberg in The Social Network.