I was raised in a typical suburban, Jewish family. Hebrew school once a week, Shabbat dinners Friday night, never setting foot in a synagogue if it wasn’t a high holiday, the usual. That fact isn’t usually that relevant to the movies I write about, but this week it is.
Two of the best, most interesting films I had the pleasure of seeing at the 33rd Annual Philadelphia Film Festival were Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain. Both films tell stories about the Jewish–American experience throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and both touch on our place in America today. This overlap struck me deeply, especially at a time when the future of Judaism in America seems to be in the most fragile state it's been in since the end of World War II.
The Brutalist tells the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian–Jewish architect who escapes the horrors of the Holocaust only to find himself stuck in Doylestown, Pennsylvania working for the gentile Van Buren family, attempting to construct their patriarch, Harrison Van Buren’s (Guy Pearce), defining monument: a multipurpose community center that also largely functions as a Church. The film deals with how Jews, and specifically Jewish artists, were forced to reconcile their craft with their Judaism as they began to assimilate into wider American society.
In A Real Pain, two cousins, David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), whose Holocaust survivor grandmother has recently passed away, are forced to grapple with her last wish: for them to go on a trip to Poland to see the village she grew up in. The cousins join a Holocaust remembrance trip and make their way across Poland, facing head–on the reminders of the horrors committed to Jews during the Holocaust.
The overlap in subject matter is clear, but what is far more interesting to me is how the filmmakers take different approaches to their core themes. Corbet takes the more subtle and introspective approach. From the very opening sequence of László arriving in America on a steamship and seeing the Statue of Liberty obscured by the mass of fellow immigrants, Corbet makes it clear that this is a story of Jewish immigration in America. Throughout the film, particularly when László encounters the quintessentially Christian–American Van Buren family, Corbet weaves through ideas of the conflict between 20th–century Zionism and more assimilationist ideas.
The inclusion by Corbet of László’s niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), the character we both begin and end the film with, is particularly notable. After Zsófia joins László in America along with Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), László’s wife, she becomes increasingly interested in the newly founded State of Israel as her dissatisfaction with her life in America, and especially with the garish Van Burens, grows. Corbet tackles the difficulty Jews have faced as long as Judaism has been around of maintaining traditions and peoplehood in a world full of bigots and antisemites. Is the solution assimilation into a land like America, he asks, or is it Zionism and having a dedicated Jewish state?
In this debate, the Van Burens act as a stand–in for America itself. They’re white, handsome, rich, vulgar, and eager to use the genius of immigrants like László for their own gain. László’s relationship with the family mirrors his ultimate dissatisfaction with the country he’s immigrated to. Throughout the second half of the film, we see László’s commitment to his Judaism wane as he becomes more and more entwined with the Van Burens. We learn that he’s stopped going to synagogue. His cynicism goes beyond his faith; we even hear him declare America a “rotten nation.” It’s probably not a coincidence that the project he’s working on for most of the film is, in essence, a church.
And yet, partly due to the glory promised to him by the Van Burens, or maybe simply to quench his inner artist’s hunger, László remains committed to finishing the project. He assimilates. He allows his artistry to come before his Judaism, something that would have seemed inconceivable at the beginning of the film. And in some ways, this choice is profitable for László. At the end of the film, we flash forward to a retrospective of László’s work set in Venice in 1980 and see that he’s now revered as one of the great American architects.
Corbet’s skepticism of this choice, however, is apparent. Instead of allowing László to speak on his own artistry, Corbet makes the decision to have Zsófia, who has not assimilated and has instead become a citizen of Israel, speak for him. She is the one who gets to define his work as explicitly a reflection of his experience escaping the Holocaust, something we never quite heard from László himself. Zsófia’s experience was nominally similar to László’s: she faced the horrors of the Holocaust and the struggle of moving to a new and strange land. The fact that her journey ends at the other end of the spectrum from László’s feels earned and natural in a way that shows Corbet’s narrative talent and intellectual curiosity.
He allows his characters to make up their own minds on the best path forward for Jews. It feels like Corbet is having a debate with himself, exploring all possibilities his characters could become. Their conclusions feel natural to who they are and the experiences they’ve had. This, in my opinion, is the mark of a great director. He’s confident enough to raise questions he doesn’t ultimately have the answer for. And confident enough in the viewer to interpret their own meaning from his work.
A Real Pain is a very different movie than The Brutalist. First, it's a 90–minute comedy, not a three–and–a–half hour epic. Naturally, Eisenberg takes a much different approach than Corbet in making his ultimate point, though many of the themes and ideas the two touch on are the same.
Eisenberg's script is more direct and on the nose, and the performance style he evokes from himself and Culkin is closer to an episode of Seinfeld than the typical Holocaust drama. And yet, this is all by design. Eisenberg is a talented filmmaker, and perhaps his best talent is knowing what he and Culkin are good at and what they’re not.
Early in the film, we meet the members of Benji and David’s tour group, whose diversity and varied relationships to Judaism itself seem particularly pointed. Instead of filling the group with a series of perfectly observant, faithful Ashkenazi Jews, something I think a worse director than Eisenberg would do, he chooses to populate his film with characters from across the spectrum of Jewish experience: a previously unobservant woman who has found a deeper connection to her Judaism in the wake of her recent divorce; a seemingly more observant couple experiencing a kind of crisis of faith as they get older; a Rwandan man who converted to Judaism after being taken in by the Jewish community in Winnipeg after escaping genocide; and a non–Jewish tour guide fascinated by Polish Jewish history in a less personal, more academic way.
In this way, Eisenberg is opening the film up to the wide variety of Jewish experiences. He’s telling us that this story, the rise and fall of Polish Jewry, belongs to all of us. I found this message, and the more interpersonal aspects of the film, to be quite poignant and effective. Eisenberg is at his best when finding connections between two characters you wouldn’t necessarily expect to have any.
What worked less well for me was the ultimate takeaway and the general lack of curiosity Eisenberg has as a writer. As expected, Benji and David find a renewed connection in their grandmother's homeland while the tour group reckons with the horrors of the Holocaust. But then the movie just kind of ... ends. There is a distinct lack of a point at the conclusion of the film. The closest thing we get is a scene in which Benji and David find their grandmother's childhood home in a small Polish village. They each leave a small stone on the stoop, the same thing you’re supposed to do when you visit a Jewish cemetery, only to be told by a group of Polish neighbors to remove the stone as it could be viewed as a hazard to the new tenants of the house.
This feels entirely out of line—and borderline disrespectful—with the message of tolerance and connection the film was preaching up until this point. Eisenberg goes out of his way to emphasize the golden age Jewish people experienced in Poland before the Holocaust, making sure not to demonize Poland in a way that felt ahistorical and a bit dirty. This film is, after all, in part funded by the film institute of Poland. Eisenberg himself has even stated that he intends to apply for Polish citizenship. It seems Eisenberg had a truly meaningful experience making this film, but I wonder if his personal feelings on the subject clouded his artistic and intellectual rigor. He chooses to see the best in Poland, something I find admirable, but he also chooses to ignore the ugly.
Eisenberg does not make any kind of connection between the situation Polish Jewry found themselves in at the beginning of the 20th century and the experiences of American Jewry today. Both are thriving minorities in a supposedly egalitarian society with internal debates as to the level of assimilation that is necessary to survive. Eisenberg is under no obligation to make a treatise on Jewish assimilation, but by setting his film in Poland and populating it with the many different types of Jews that exist in the world, I do feel he has some responsibility, both to today's Jews and those who were murdered throughout Polish history, to use his art to say something meaningful.
In an interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light, Eisenberg said, “I was never trying to think of the movie as some kind of broad meta commentary on my generation’s relationship to history. Everything in the movie is just how I feel about things—I’m a middle–class East Coast Jewish American who feels a little bit of meaninglessness in my life and a lack of connection to something greater than myself.” While I respect Eisenberg’s artistic goals for A Real Pain, I think this quote sums up exactly my problem.
Not every film about Jewish people has to touch on the Holocaust and our current relationship to it. Nor do all movies about Jews have to be about our place in the world and in society. However, by setting his film in Poland and by raising certain questions about the relationship between Jews and the countries they live in, only to abandon this thread in order to achieve personal resolution for the characters, Eisenberg is ultimately falling short as a writer.
This film could have been set anywhere. Benji and David’s grandmother could have been from Germany instead of Poland, and their emotional journey would have been the same. I even think the film would have a similar takeaway and emotional impact if you removed all aspects of Judaism from it and simply had two cousins going to their grandmother’s hometown. To me, that makes it feel like the setting and all the window dressing around it is merely cosplay.
Unlike Corbet, Eisenberg seems completely incurious about his characters and what they think about what they’re witnessing. He’s disinterested in the wider implications and connections his story may have to Jewish history or the modern Jewish community. It’s like Eisenberg is using the setting of American Jews reckoning with the ruins of Polish Jewry as nothing more than one in a series of narrative setups.
This situation is made all the more interesting by the filmmakers' different backgrounds. Neither Corbet nor his co-writer and partner Mona Fastvold, are, to my knowledge, Jewish. Eisenberg, on the other hand, grew up in a Jewish household and got famous playing many Jewish characters. Maybe this is a case of inspection only being possible from an outside perspective. Or maybe this is simply a case of comparing two filmmakers with two very different skill sets and intentions. Nevertheless, Philadelphia Film Festival's struck two different chords: Corbet’s success and intellectual rigor when starting conversation about the past and future of American Jewry, and Eisenberg’s failure to even conceive of that conversation.
