Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

Trauma

9 January 2025

5 min read

The battle between seen and unseen pain

Jesse Eisenberg explores how the generations cope with pain.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Two male cousins converse across the aisle of a train.

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg.

In today’s ultra-developed world, where technological and medical advances have reached unprecedented heights, suffering remains an unsolved problem. While the World Health Organization claims the successful prevention, elimination, or treatment of more diseases than ever before, it also highlights significant increases in anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders worldwide. This paradox raises questions not only about the root causes of mental health suffering but also about the way we understand its current prevalence and impact. Are today’s struggles any different to those others have experienced before us? Is the pain equally real? As we approach the eightieth anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day, can we truly equate the silent struggles of contemporary emotional health challenges with the unimaginably harrowing experiences of those who endured the worst horrors of war, violence, and genocide?

Jesse Eisenberg dares to tackle these complex questions with his directorial debut, A Real Pain, a masterful exploration of trauma, resilience, and the search for meaning. Co-starring Kieran Culkin in a career-defining performance, the film takes viewers on a journey that is part road trip, part comedy-drama, part historical reflection, and wholly compelling. I believe it offers a timely and deeply thought-provoking challenge to consider how we recognise and process pain across generations as well as understand the way pain shapes – and reshapes – our lives.

In the film, Eisenberg and Culkin portray two estranged Jewish-American cousins, David and Benji, who embark on a shared mission to retrace the steps of their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. What begins as a simple road trip to Poland quickly transforms into something much more as the brutal reality of intergenerational trauma and mental health struggles rise to the surface. The film’s themes can be explored through three key lenses: the passing on of pain, the proximity of pain, and the problem of pain.

The passing on of pain

At its heart, A Real Pain is a story about legacy—the burdens and blessings passed down through generations. Though their shared grandmother is no longer alive, her story of survival, resilience, and eventual flourishing has left a profound impact on her descendants. Her story draws the cousins in, but it also draws them together and apart in different ways over the course of the trip. There is tragedy and comedy, and poignant moments of connection as well as frustration as Eisenberg explores how trauma echoes through generations, affecting different people in different ways, weighing heavily on those who did not live through the original events. This theme is handled with nuance showing both the strength and fragility that come from confronting a painful past. Ultimately it brings us to a new question – how do we honour the suffering of those who came before us while also finding our own path, or paths, to healing?

The proximity of pain

As the cousins delve deeper into their family’s history, the film juxtaposes the grandmother’s resilience in the face of antisemitism, war, and Holocaust with Benji’s struggles. Despite severe loss, grief and trauma, the grandmother went on to live a meaningful life. Benji on the other hand struggles to keep on top of his daily responsibilities, hold down a job, and maintain relationships. He struggles to find any meaning in his life and reveals he has attempted suicide. How, he wonders, did his grandmother find the strength to fight for her life against the backdrop of the Holocaust when he can’t even navigate the relative peace of middle-class America? This question seems to add to his despair. He seems thoroughly beaten.

Eisenberg does not provide easy answers but instead invites viewers to wrestle with these complexities of life and death, resilience, and vulnerability. He forces us to confront our assumptions about suffering and strength. By making us reflect on which pain is more real, he seems to have found a way to challenge us both to honour the reality of past trauma and recognise the reality of the struggles faced by those around us. He has certainly found a way to help us empathise both with the millions of people who are currently displaced and traumatised by violence, conflict, and displacement, and, equally, with the millions whose mental health is in tatters.

The problem of pain

At its core, A Real Pain tackles the universal question: what do we do with suffering? Do we bury it in the past? Do we pretend it does not exist? Do we insulate ourselves from the pain of others? Do we respond with frustration and anger or with patience and empathy? Do we accept pain as a tragic by-product of existence? Do we struggle under the burden of it? Do we let it defeat us? Do we find ways to learn from it? Can pain make us stronger? Can it make us better people? Does it point to something deeper within us or, indeed, something beyond us?

Right in the middle of the film, David and Benji meet a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. who provides a stark reminder that the horrors of the Holocaust are not just consigned to history, that even today there are places where entire people groups are being targeted, destroyed, and displaced. This character has clearly found solace and meaning through his faith, in contrast to the cousins’ secular Jewish identities. The tension between belief and unbelief runs through the film and reflects the wider experience of many for whom pain has been a critical factor in their journey either to faith or away from it.

For C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia chronicles who offered spiritual solace to the nation during the Second World War and who was personally familiar with suffering writes: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Pain, for many Christians like Lewis is supposed to draw us towards faith – it is an urgent invitation to seek meaning and connection in a fractured world. Pain reminds us of our mortality and vulnerability, and our dependence not just on others, but perhaps too on an Almighty being who offers hope, healing and the promise of a life beyond this in a world where there is no more death, no more tears, no more pain.

With A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg has crafted a film that will make you laugh and cry and think and discuss and reach out to others, or even to God. This film invites you to reflect on the past, present and future, to wrestle with the pain we carry and to seek meaning beyond it. It’s a must-watch for anyone who dares to reflect on life’s most profound questions.

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Article

Art

Culture

10 February 2025

5 min read

Why is religious art still popular?

What looters, curators and today's public find in a genre that survives the centuries.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting depicts a man a prophet pointing skywards while another person sleeps on the ground

Detail from Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome.

The National Gallery.

The museums of Europe and North America are filled with religious art. Why? Certainly, gallery goers of the nineteenth century, when many public museums were founded, were more likely to practice a faith than visitors in today’s global cities, but this does not explain religious art’s continuing appeal. If we are so much more secular than the folks in stiff collars and leg ‘o mutton sleeves who curated and donated to early museum collections, why is the religious art they championed still so popular?

Individual religious paintings’ chequered history, together with the formal elements of their composition, provide two lenses into the genre’s ability to resonate across multiple generations.

Celebrations around the National Gallery’s 200th anniversary, with its reappraisal of the earliest works to enter the collection, offers an ideal time to study the blueprints for public collections, which continue to shape the art we see today. The French Revolution is popularly credited as the genesis of public art institutions, as the art and fine furniture from displaced aristocrat’s palaces was put on display at the Louvre, opened in 1793. But the idea of a semi-public art collections had been present in Italy from the early eighteenth century, as families opened their palazzos and collections of classical art to visitors on the Grand Tour. Rome’s Capitoline Museum opened in 1734, as the papacy saw an opportunity to showcase the heritage of ancient Rome to the city’s wealthy tourists, and position themselves in the role of art patrons.

At the National Gallery, Parmigianino’s The Vision of St Jerome, 1526-1527, (reunited for the first time with rare preparatory drawings until 9 March) pulls on many of the threads that makes religious art, even in a secular age, enduringly powerful.

Painted when Parmigianino was only 24, and already being hailed as ‘Raphael reborn’, the painting is reputed to have stopped looting soldiers in their tracks, when they saw it in the artist’s studio during the 1527 Sack of Rome. The painting itself had an adventurous life, spending far longer in secular surroundings than it ever did in the religious settings it was intended for.

Commissioned as an altarpiece for a funerary chapel in Rome, the upheaval of the city’s occupation by the troops of Charles V saw The Vision of St Jerome stored, but not publicly displayed, in the refectory of a nearby church. Somehow during the terror and mayhem, the 3.5 metres high altarpiece, weighing nearly 100 kilograms, was transported from the artist’s studio across the city to safety.

Thirty years later a great nephew of the original woman patron, Maria Bufalini, took the altarpiece from Rome to the family’s Umbrian hometown of Citta di Castello. Had it instead gone to its intended Roman church San Salvatore in Lauro, it would have been destroyed by the church fire of 1591. The Vision of St Jerome stayed in the family chapel of Sant’Agostino, inspiring artists from the region, until around 1772 when Cardinal Giovanni Bufalini moved the altarpiece to the restored Palazzo Bufalini, placing a copy in Sant’Agostino. If the original stayed in the church it would have been ruined by an earthquake in 1789.

Having spent just over 200 years in a sacred setting, the painting was sold by the Bufalini heirs to an English art agent in Rome, setting sail from Livorno in December 1791 for its new life in England.

After inheriting Parmigianino’s Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (1535-40), George Watson Taylor, with his heiress wife Anna, added The Vision of Saint Jerome to the significant private art collection, displayed at their London Townhouse in Cavendish Square. In 1819 the painting was exhibited publicly in England for the first time when Watson Taylor lent it the British Institution, the forerunner of the National Gallery.

Four years later the painting fetched £3,202 at the sale of Watson Taylor’s collection, securing a higher price than Rubens’ Rainbow Landscape. It was purchased by the Reverend William Holwell Carr on behalf of the British Institution. The Vision of Saint Jerome hung in the National Gallery within two years of the institution’s foundation.

Once part of the nation’s collection, the mannerist style of Parmigianino, with its elongated limbs, twisted torsos, classical drapery and foreshortened perspective, provided a context to discuss the Biblical figures depicted in the work. A loosely draped, seated Virgin Mary holds a tussle haired child between her knees, who kicks one leg out, as if to step away. Beneath them John the Baptist points a massive arm towards the heavens, while a smaller scale St Jerome sleeps clutching a crucifix. Regency and Victorian Christians such as Howell Carr, and popular art historians Anna Jameson and Elizabeth Eastlake, wife of the Gallery’s first director Charles, saw the potential of art created 400 years ago to speak to the spiritual questions of their day. Shorn of a traditional religious setting, the message, and missional potential, of the work came across as powerfully as ever.

After surviving war, fire and earthquakes, The Vision of Saint Jerome was relocated to Manod Quarry in Wales from 1941 until the end of World War Two to escape the bombing of London. During this period, the National Gallery brought one painting out of storage to view in the empty Trafalgar Square landmark, the war weary public’s Picture of the Month. The tradition continues today.

For sleep -deprived, food -rationed, scared wartime Londoners Noli me Tangere offered a message of love, loss, transcendence and protection.

The first Picture of the Month, in 1942, was Titian’s Noli me Tangere, c. 1514. In a rather Italianate Garden of Gethsemane, with glowing sun and tumbling hills, Mary reaches out her hand to Christ. Having tended Christ’s crucified body in the tomb, Mary is grieving, and at first believes the figure before her is a gardener. To her astonishment he reveals himself to be the Christ, resurrected from the dead. Titian portrays the bittersweet moment after Christ’s miraculous return, when Mary comprehends that although Christ is present, she can no longer have any human contact with him, represented by her rebuffed gesture of touch. In common with all Christ’s followers, it is time to relinquish his earthly presence. While the kneeling Mary is bound to the earth, the standing Christ figure forms an arc over her, representing his protection of humanity.

For sleep -deprived, food -rationed, scared wartime Londoners Noli me Tangere offered a message of love, loss, transcendence and protection.

Religious art’s continued survival, through eras of supposed indifference, amplifies its specialness and continuing popularity.

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