The same day Jewish filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg spoke with me via Zoom, he appeared on “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” where his rapid-fire delivery and neurotic jumpiness were on full display. The guy looked like a walking panic attack even though he was seated on Clarkson’s couch. Of course, it’s all just part of his enormous charm and genuine likeability.
Hyper-aware that he’s overly anxious by nature, Eisenberg, 41, wears his angst like a second skin. He is funny, even when he doesn’t mean to be, like when he admitted to Clarkson his first love is musical theater, then immediately beat himself up for saying so and embarrassing himself on national TV.
Why Eisenberg was on the show in the first place is the same reason he was talking to me: to promote his new movie, “A Real Pain,” which he wrote, directed and stars in, along with Kieran Culkin of “Succession” fame. Already garnering award buzz and the winner of best screenplay at the Sundance Film Festival, “A Real Pain” is slated to open in local theaters on Nov. 15. (It opens the St. Louis International Film Festival on Nov. 7).
In the film, the two portray mismatched Jewish cousins who travel together to Poland as part of a Holocaust tour before veering off to visit their recently deceased grandmother’s childhood home. Close in age, the cousins grew up like brothers but drifted apart in adulthood, and not just because of physical distance.
Eisenberg’s tightly wound, rule follower David has a secure job and family back home while Culkin, as single Benji, is a magnetic man-child who repels with wild mood swings and inappropriateness as quickly as he attracts admirers with his charisma. The result is a deft, thoughtful 90-minute dramedy that contemplates the impact family history, struggles and trauma have on our lives and how we connect to them –or don’t.
Eisenberg had thought about playing the part of Benji until his sister, actress Hallie Eisenberg, told him, “no other person on the planet” could do the role better than Culkin.
“My first thought was wait, does Kieran do drama or comedy?” said Eisenberg during our conversation, where he sported the same Indiana Hoosiers cap David wears throughout the movie. (Eisenberg, his wife, Anna Stout, and 7-year-old son, Banner, have lived in Bloomington, Ind., where Stout grew up, on and off over the last 10 years).
“This movie has to be both, funny but on the verge of tears — laughing through tears is the goal,” he continued. “And for this character (Benji) in particular — you want to slap him in the face and then get him an ice pack and give him a hug.
“There is no one who is funnier, wittier, sharper, more biting but also more loving than Kieran. He feels emotions at the drop of a hat. He’s had a tough life and yet he’s as sharp as hell and unsentimental about it.”
While Eisenberg said the film is not autobiographical, some of the experiences and characters were drawn from his own life as well as a trip he and Stout made to Poland in 2008. When he found himself in the village of Krasnystaw, where his beloved Aunt Doris lived before the Holocaust displaced her family, he remembers looking at her house and not feeling anything profound or cathartic. He started to wonder what was wrong with him.
By the same token, his relationship to his aunt, who lived to be 106, was greatly meaningful if not transformative. He spent Thursday nights with her from the time he was 17 and even slept on her couch during his thirties, when he and Stout were briefly living apart.
“She was the only person who yelled at me about things and not only my posture, but my diet, the friends I kept, my romantic life,” said Eisenberg. “She was tough on me, and I needed that. And for some reason I found myself gravitating towards somebody who was tough on me because I felt, as I do now, life is too comfortable and I’m suspicious of it. And she made life tough, and that’s what I needed to connect to.”
If toughness somehow equates with a tireless work ethic, Aunt Doris would be extremely proud. Eisenberg, who’s likely best known for his turn as Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s “The Social Network,” which earned him an Oscar nomination, has appeared in films and on television steadily over the past two decades, including a pair of Woody Allen movies and FX’s “Fleishman is in Trouble.” Two days before our interview, he wrapped up the third installment in the crime-thriller franchise “Now You See Me 3,” due out next year.
“A Real Pain” is Eisenberg’s sophomore directorial effort; his first was “When You Finish Saving the World,” which premiered at the 2022 Sundance festival. In addition, he has written four plays, including “The Revisionist,” about a Polish Holocaust survivor, in which he starred opposite Vanessa Redgrave.
He is writing, directing and likely acting in his next project but declined to provide details for fear of getting sued. “I’m just trying to stay busy because I’m in an industry that doesn’t care if you succeed or fail,” he said. “You could be successful one day and the next day, no one knows your name. It’s such a fickle industry.”
He says the happiest he’s been was during the pandemic when he volunteered at the domestic violence shelter his mother-in-law runs, because there were no movies being made.
“I was painting the walls and fixing toilets and garbage disposals,” he said. “And I will say I’ve never been happier in my entire life. And then I go back to the movie industry and feel in a panic all day worrying about things not going well.”
Things, thankfully, went pretty well on location in Poland, he adds, which included being the first film crew to shoot at the former concentration camp Majdanek, near Lubin. Eisenberg became so connected to the country during the shoot that he applied for citizenship, hoping to foster better relations between Jews and Poles. He recently received notification of its approval and will be formally awarded with it later this month.
In the end, Eisenberg hopes that audiences will walk away from “A Real Pain” pondering the same questions he does.
“Which is how do we reconcile modern pain against the backdrop of historical suffering? How do we think about ourselves in our middle-class comfortable lives when there is suffering around the world now? And is our grief and modern-day discomfort valid when there are so many greater horrors in the world?”
He further explains: “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. Exploring my own family’s history gave me an access point to try to get greater meaning in my life. This movie is a reflection of that.”
