“A real pain”: good and acidic comedy with the background of a tragedy

One day Yakele Fuksa survivor of Auschwitz, took his granddaughter to see that camp where he had suffered so much. But already at the door he couldn’t help but blurt out, with typical Jewish humor, “They charged me for admission! The first time I came they didn’t charge me.”

That moment appears in the documentary “The tree on the wall”of Thomas Lipgota warm portrait of a man who lost his entire family but did not collapse. A grandmother, of similar strength, imagines Jesse Eisenberg for his dramatic comedy “A real pain”. And he also imagines grandchildren who don’t look too much like him.

One is formal, slightly neurotic, insecure, and has everything organized: work, home, wife and daughter. The other is a toss-up who didn’t build his house or have a steady job. He is nice, cool, clever, he knows how to perceive what is happening to people inside, but suddenly he becomes unfriendly, rude, he makes people messy. He is a kind of bipolar that is as lovable as it is unbearable.

They are cousins. They haven’t seen each other for a long time. Now that their grandmother has died, they meet again to make a pilgrimage together to what was their home in Poland. This is how the movie begins. But there is something else. The trip is scheduled as a guided tour for a small group of Jews who want to refresh their roots.

They will visit Warsaw, Lublin and the Majdenek concentration camp. The guide is a young, rather sketchy Englishman. In the group there is a retired couple, a recently divorced blonde woman and, uniquely, a young Rwandan who survived the horrific massacre of his people and found in Judaism an explanation and consolation for his torment.

Throughout the trip, which is brief, there will be entanglements, complicities, gradual mutual understanding (of course, to the extent that one can understand a person who perhaps does not even understand himself), so the guide will also be forced to change her schemes a little, the recently divorced lady will find company, at least for one night, in short, there will be laughter, some truths will appear, those things that happen on trips.

But not everything will be simple laughter, and not all truths are told or bring relief. Pay attention to the crazy cousin’s face at the beginning of the movie. Pay attention to the same face, at the end. What’s going on in that head? The smart thing about this comedy is that it doesn’t put everything together. It’s not as simple as it seems. And he knows how to move us.

Responsible, Jesse Eisenbergscreenwriter, director, protagonist as the more focused cousin, and Kieran Culkin like the madman who laughs so as not to cry, as the tango says. Very good work from both of them. By the way, Jennifer Graythe blonde lady, is the same Jennifer Gray that, when she was young, she did “Dirty Dancing” with Patrick Swayzein the mid ’80s. It’s nice to see how well it is maintained.

“A real pain” (A Real Pain, USA, 2024); Dir.: Jesse Eisenberg; Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey, Will Sharpe, Kurt Egyawan.