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

Belief

Books

Culture

Morality

21 July 2025

5 min read

Jane Austen’s satire helped her survive a dark culture

Amid folly and frailty, she allowed her characters the possibility of forgiveness

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Juliet Stevenson stars in Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.

BBC.

Do Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines really get the happy endings they deserve? Not exactly, argues writer and journalist Julia Yost in her recent essay, Jane Austen’s Darkness (Wiseblood Books, 2024).

Far from an escapist Regency fantasy, Yost paints Austen’s world as one ruled by mediocrity and hatred. While believing that ‘Marriage is the heroine’s only defense against darkness’, an institution where goodness can put up a fight against moral bankruptcy, Yost also ultimately argues that none of Austen’s heroines, with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet’s in Pride and Prejudice, manage to triumph over society’s corruption.

Most Austen readers will be able to recite a list of her villains: Mr. Wickham, Mr. Willoughby, Henry Crawford… but Yost goes beyond this, pointing out that certain universal social malaises – greed, unregulated anger, lack of charity – infect even the supposedly nobler characters in Austen’s novels. For example, Yost interprets Emma Woodhouse’s mocking of Miss Bates, Highbury’s verbally incontinent spinster, not as a sign of immaturity, but as an expression of ‘contempt’ for a social inferior. Another character in Emma, Frank Churchill, is not simply a foolish young man trying to hide an engagement to one woman by flirting with another; he actively ‘enjoys toying with Emma’, and even ‘enjoys torturing Jane [Fairfax]’, his secret fiancée, by spending time with Emma in public. Eleanor Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility’s calm and collected heroine, is guilty of moral compromise by marrying the undeserving Edward Ferrars. Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father in Pride and Prejudice, is an unreformed misanthrope. Vice runs rampant in Yost’s reading of Austen’s novels.

Not even the truly admirable men and women of Austen’s stories are spared from suffering entirely. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth marry under the threat of the soon-to-be-resumed Napoleonic Wars. In Pride and Prejudice, the Darcys’ marital happiness, we are told in the final chapter, is not quite enough to spread moral betterment among their family and friends: Elizabeth’s sister Kitty improves greatly, but Lady Catherine de Bourgh remains arrogant, Mr. Wickham retains his rakishness, and Lydia stays just as thoughtless.

For Yost, showing this universal moral malady does not weaken but rather strengthens the novels’ moral gravity. ‘Austen’s satire is salubrious’, she writes, and agreeing with the Austen scholar D.W. Harding, who, in his 1940 essay ‘Regulated Hatred’, argued that laughing at vice is a ‘means for unobtrusive spiritual survival’ amidst social and natural evils. Austen’s biting condemnation, in other words, is the only way to dispel the power of human vices.

As I was reading Jane Austen’s Darkness, I found myself agreeing with many of Yost’s observations. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade writing about why Jane Austen’s satirical tone serves to make us, the readers, more aware of our failings, so Yost finds a natural ally in me.

Despite this, I was left feeling that something was missing. There’s a dimension of forgiveness to Austen’s narrative pattern that remains largely unspoken. To be fair to Yost, that’s not the focus of the essay. And yet, I’d be remiss not to mention that, in Austen’s novels, we can’t speak of condemnation without also speaking of repentance.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness.

For every example of moral failure in an Austen novel, a corresponding example of true remorse can be found. Austen tells us that, after the incident where Emma mocks Miss Bates publicly, she experiences a mixture of ‘anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern’. ‘Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life’, we’re further told, ‘She was most forcibly struck. The truth of this representation there was no denying’. Emma’s shame pushes her to admit her mistakes to herself. Something similar happens to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, when she realises how blind she has been to Mr. Darcy’s goodness and Mr. Wickham’s deception. Similarly, Yost is right that Mr. Bennet’s misanthropy ‘disables him as a moral actor’, but after his daughter Lydia’s elopement with Mr. Wickham, he begins to feel the force of guilt, knowing that this might have been prevented, had he been more involved in his own children’s upbringing. And if Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is passive at the risk of ceasing to be a moral agent altogether, she more than makes up for it when she sternly refuses to marry the rakish Henry Crawford, a man she neither respects nor loves.

Austen’s characters are undeniably fallible. But human frailty also allows for the possibility for repentance and, ultimately, forgiveness. As the late philosopher and Austen devotee Alasdair Macintyre argued in After Virtue (1981), all of Austen’s heroines experience a moment when they recognise their own failings, and this newly acquired virtue of ‘self-knowledge’ allows them to repent and more consciously act as moral agents in the world.

In turn, these true acts of repentance open up the way to mutual forgiveness. After marrying Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, who’d claimed that he couldn’t easily ‘forget the follies and vices of others’ agrees to reconcile with his aunt Lady Catherine, welcomes Lydia into his house, and even continues to financially support Mr. Wickham for Lydia’s sake. In Persuasion, Captain Wentworth eventually forgives Lady Russell for the role she played in ending his first engagement to Anne Elliot. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor Dashwood forgives Mr. Willoughby for abandoning her sister Marianne after he confesses how much he regrets his actions.

Even when granted to someone we may consider undeserving, this central act of forgiveness heals broken social bonds. Perhaps, it’s even more healing than the ‘salubrious’ effect of Austen’s biting satire. There is darkness in Austen, but there is also much light. And if her novels prove that moral corruption is ubiquitous, they also make the case that, despite our corrupted nature, we’re not unsalvageable: forgiveness and redemption are always within reach of humankind.

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