“Theodor Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz,” writes Emil Stern, “but he didn’t say anything about buddy movies.” Stern was moved to this observation by the recent film A Real Pain—written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who also plays one of the main characters—about two Jewish cousins who visit Poland to learn about their family history. Stern comments:
For a film about emotional inheritance and the gap between personal and ancestral pain, A Real Pain seems determined not to dig too deeply. It feels warmly toward its solipsistic characters, but the film’s warmth and self-effacement come at the expense of any larger point. It doesn’t just depict its characters who have a limited understanding of the past; it endorses it.
Eisenberg, in interviews, has described the film as a “love letter to Poland.” Well, as Woody Allen might say, the heart wants what the heart wants. I understand how many Jewish customs and attitudes come from the Jewish people’s time in Ashkenaz. And I myself loved my time (and even felt at home) in Munich, where my mother was born after the war—but I also felt the obvious historical complication of that affection, an ambivalence the film might have expressed or explored. My grandparents talked about the beauty of Polish forests, but this did not negate the brutality of much of the local population or what sometimes happened in those forests.
Read more at Jewish Review of Books
More about: Film, Holocaust, Jewish history, Poland