I wasn’t eager to see this because of Kieran Culkin and the really reprehensible character he played on Succession. They were all disgusting people but his character was so dismissive and awful, I just knew going in that a lot of that energy would be in this character as well. And I guess I just didn’t want to be reminded of it.
But I like Jesse Eisenberg and once saw him when crossing the street — he coming in the opposite direction. He stared at me and he has a very intense stare and he is also as thin as a rail.
In this they play cousins whose mutual grandmother, a holocaust survivor from Poland, has died and left them money with the request that the visit her homeland. Benji (Culkin) lives in Binghamton and David (Eisenberg) lives in Brooklyn. But they are vastly different personalities and I think the poster shows that pretty well. They are basically sharing a room on a holocaust tour guided by a British man (Will Sharpe) with a life long interest in Eastern Europe and that area of the world. Sharpe does a great job distancing himself from his recent character on The White Lotus (the one married to Aubrey Plaza) and you don’t feel that anything is exploitive about the movie, even the visit to the nearby Majdanek Concentration Camp which is just a few miles from Lublin. They intent to visit their grandmother’s home, parting ways with the others in the group.
But the conflict comes because Benji is, basically, a depressed and out of control nut while Eisenberg is a comfortable Brooklynite with a small family. And much of the very moving parts of the movie aren’t the holocaust related visits, it is Benji and David’s different ways of relating to being third generation jewish people. (3rd generation from the initial holocaust survivors, that is.) This whole notion of 3rd generation is repeated in various forms and I think it frequently comes up because it isn’t possible for the 3rd generation of any group to understand what the 1st generation went through. You can try. You can empathize. You can read books and wikipedia articles, or letters from that generation. But to really get at that core, (the real pain of the title), is not really possible.
Anyway it’s a wonderful movie and well worth the time to see it.