Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar Moment

Hi there!

If you’ve been following awards season, you’ve likely seen Kieran Culkin or Jesse Eisenberg hop on stage to accept trophies for A Real Pain. Eisenberg wrote and directed the film, which follows two American Jewish cousins, played by Eisenberg and Culkin, honoring their late Holocaust survivor grandmother by going on a heritage trip to Poland. 

A Real Pain has gotten praise for its frank and tender—and also quite funny—portrayal of these mismatched cousins traveling through the old country, with Eisenberg playing the stressed out straight man and Culkin embodying the frenetic yet lovable stoner. It’s also gotten a fair amount of criticism from various corners of Jewish media. 

But honestly, I loved it. It was a refreshing take on a genre that we think we know, and a film clearly created with a lot of heart. If you didn’t catch it in theaters, you can stream it on Hulu.

When you think of Jesse Eisenberg, you probably think of him as Mark Zuckerberg. I think of him as Marcel Marceau. 

In fact, he was a guest on Unorthodox when he portrayed the French Jewish mime in the film Resistance. I spoke to Eisenberg again this fall for ARC Magazine, a great new publication from my former podcast co-host Mark Oppenheimer. Eisenberg was candid about how growing up comfortably in America had always left him feeling removed from his relatives’ suffering during the Holocaust, a fixation that comes through in this film. 

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then. With the Oscars airing this Sunday, and A Real Pain nominated for Best Original Screenplay (Eisenberg) and Best Supporting Actor (Culkin), I wanted to share an abridged version of the interview with GOLDA readers.  

With thanks to the wonderful ARC team for letting me reprint it, below is my conversation with Jesse Eisenberg about A Real Pain. You can read the full thing here.

Stephanie Butnick: The film marks this interesting moment on the continuum of art that grapples with the Holocaust, which starts with the immediate post-war memoir and arrives where we are today, which is essentially grandchildren going back and trying to figure out where they came from. It feels like the best way to describe this moment, and much of the film, is the haunting of distance. 

Jesse Eisenberg: The haunting of distance is a wonderful way to put it. But to me, it feels like my life has a lack of meaning because of the distance from what my relatives went through to ultimately create a comfortable life here in America. I feel a lack of meaning in my life, and the more distance that I get from being connected to those who have been through more potent circumstances, the less meaning I feel. 

And so when you talk about the continuum of Holocaust response, and that it starts with immediate first-person accounts of terror, and now a movie about two cousins who’ve grown apart exploring their family history with a feeling of disconnect, that’s true. With the movie, I was really trying to show how the characters develop their own anxieties and inner demons that are seemingly unrelated to their family’s history. And they’re going back in an attempt to understand where they came from, and to try and feel a connection to something greater than themselves. 

Was that true for you personally? 

Yeah, 100 percent. I first went to this town where my family lived, Krasnystaw in Poland, in 2008. My wife and I stood outside this house that I was told my family lived in up until 1938—seventy-eight years prior. I was standing outside the house, desperate to feel something, to have some kind of catharsis, to close an emotional loop in my mind, to experience the ghosts of my past, et cetera, and understand where I come from and how I fit into the great timeline of our ancestors and our family tree. 

And I just didn’t feel anything. 

I’m just looking at a three-story house. Suddenly, you’re outside and you look weird because you’re just standing there staring up at a building, and locals are passing you wondering what the hell you’re doing. So, yeah, I’ve just always felt this need for connection to something bigger than myself, and struggling to find it. A lot of this movie really is just my attempt at doing that, but through this fictional story of these cousins. 

I did my own return to Poland, a fellowship in grad school, with a week spent living in the town where Auschwitz is, and you really nailed it. What you capture so well is that disconnect of who we are now—going back there. I’m curious about that chasm of what could be. Your characters say something like, “We could have been from here … ” 

Yeah, exactly. The way I am able to fathom that big idea is thinking that my family was in Poland more than they were in America. If you look at the grand scale of the family timeline, America is a blip, and yet for me it feels like I’ve lived in New York for ten thousand years. It feels like my family knows Queens better than we know each other’s faces. And yet it’s just a blip. 

You lived in Oswiecim? 

Yeah.

Everyone was like, “Why are you going back?” Even my great aunt, who at the time was the only survivor still alive in our family, was like, “Why would you go to Poland?” and also, “Be careful with your purse.” Those were the two things she said before I went to find the house she grew up in. 

That’s really funny: My great aunt Doris, who I based this movie on—we call her Grandma Dory in the movie—I told her if I ever work in Europe I will go to your house and get a picture of it. So that’s why I went to that house: to get a picture for my aunt who grew up there. 

I came home to America, I took the digital camera to the CVS, I printed out the most beautiful, glossy image of this house, and I brought it to her house and I said, “Look! This is it.” 

She looked at it and said, “Oh, yeah, I think that’s it.” 

And that was it. She had the most unimpressed reaction you could possibly have. It’s exactly what you’re saying.

It almost seems like that is the reality of the third generation, right? There was the trauma of the Holocaust survivors, and then their kids, who were really close to it. By the time a survivor is a grandparent or a great aunt, they want to tell their stories, maybe for the first time. And they are telling their stories to a generation who are, as the film explores, quite comfortable here in America. It makes sense that those are the people who start being curious about the past, and who want to go back there. 

That’s exactly right. You hit on something that makes sense generationally: That you have enough distance to not feel that unplaceable rage, and you have a curiosity about the world because we’re growing up in a more global society. It feels a little more comfortable, travel is cheaper and easier, people are speaking English there now. So for a variety of reasons it allows people of our generation to re-engage with a place that maybe our parents’ generation felt too uncomfortable with. 

Best of luck to Jesse and the rest of the A Real Pain team (including producer/fairy godmother Emma Stone) at Sunday’s Academy Awards.  

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Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie