First impressions of A Real Pain

The marketing for A Real Pain really worried me. I suspected that it would be guilty of one of my biggest pet peeves in storytelling.

Most creative writing teachers have probably encountered one of these: an essay in which the writer compares a moment of personal importance to something grossly disproportionate. I’ve seen young writers, eager to make an impression, refer to being corrected by an authority figure as their “personal 9/11”; or they’ll describe defending their personal space at home as something akin to the Israeli/Palestine conflict; or they’ll refer to an authoritarian father as the family Hitler. I’ve read essays in which we’re led into the fraught contexts of Jane Austen’s grand romances — Bennet and Darcy, Woodhouse and Knightley, Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon — only to discover that what the writer really wants to do with this essay is proclaim the glory of their current two-week-old romance, or rant about the wrongs done to them by someone they dated for six weeks and who “didn’t know the first thing about love.”

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the ambition! And I can imagine versions of any of these in which they might actually work (particularly if they’re meant to be funny).

But occasions such as these often give me flashbacks to a moment from the movie The Fault in Our Stars — a scene so tactless, so jarring, that I don’t remember much of what happens after that. Perhaps you’re already flinching as it flashes back to you.

As the two young and terminally ill lovers Hazel and Augustus on a journey to Amsterdam, they visit the Anne Frank House — to pay their respects, of course, to that bright, curious girl whose spark was erased in a wave of racist hatred. And as they stand in that sacred space, when we should be thinking about all they might learn there — about innocence, about history, about the failures that lead to such tidal waves of violence — we suddenly realize that, no, that’s not what the movie is interested in. Instead, we’re here to exploit the darkness of the location’s history as contrast to the shiny, swoon-worthy occasion of the teenagers’ first kiss.

In staging this, the storytellers seem to succumb to the same tone-deaf opportunism that seized Justin Bieber when he signed the Anne Frank House guestbook: “Anne was a great girl,” he wrote. “Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”

With this in mind, and more recent examples of this exploitative impulse in my stacks of recent student papers, I approached A Real Pain with trepidation. It looked like it might well be susceptible to the same impulse — using Holocaust memorials as a dramatic backdrop for what is, in essence, a buddy comedy that goes for a one-two punch of laughter and tears.

I wasn’t sure I was ready for Planes, Trains, and Holocaust Memorials.

The trailer revealed its premise: Two cousins — David (Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) — grieving the death of their grandmother, set out to take a tour of Poland, driven by a burden of responsibility to learn more about their family’s holocaust-haunted history and to see their grandmother’s childhood home for themselves. Along the way, they must reckon with a growing sense of separation and hard feelings, as the friendship of their childhood has been altered by the differing demands of adulthood.

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