Jennifer Grey Co-Stars in ‘A Real Pain’
The one-time star of “Dirty Dancing” is back, older and wiser, in Jesse Eisenberg’s new hit, “A Real Pain.”
“A Real Pain,” the first movie to be directed by Jessie Eisenberg, got an enthusiastic reception at its American premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last January, where it was snapped up by Sony Pictures.
It’s an intimate film with only a half-dozen characters about how two very different 30-something Jewish men — cousins, one married, one not — visit present-day Poland.
They join a small tour group that gives them a chance to encounter the past and each other. Among those along for the tour is an older, recently divorced Jewish woman who is going through her own pain. She is played by Jennifer Grey, the veteran Hollywood star.
AJT: What was your first impression when they sent you the script, before you were cast.
Grey: You go off what’s on the page, OK, and my first thought was your part was boring. I’m sorry, when I read the script, it was the only part that I was like, OK, that part’s boring. And then when they cast you, I was like, oh, OK, I guess it’s not going to be that boring.
AJT: And how did you prepare for this part? Or did you?
Grey: I didn’t have to prepare at all. I think in this particular case, I felt that I trusted the script. I trusted myself. I trusted that I was cast for a reason, and I shared a lot of what Marcia is going through when we meet her in the movie. I had a different experience, but I did it four years ahead when I divorced, so I felt almost like I was her friend, like I could shepherd her through the loss of her marriage and her family life and the loss of parts of herself. It was almost like feeling I’m her cheerleader. I could, so she can do this. She has the resilience of her Jewish ancestors. She has what it takes to be able to put herself out of her comfort zone, out of L.A. out of her cushy life.
When I get a part, I usually pretty soon know that it’s there for me, for my transformation, for my psyche, my evolution as a human. And I felt like we were doing it together, and I didn’t feel like there was much preparation.
AJT: And the reviews have been quite complimentary. Why does this film work as well as it does?
Grey: You know, it’s a little bit like lightning in a bottle. When a movie works like this one does, it’s always hard to break down what it is that made it so, because then everyone could make it. So, I really believe the secret sauce of this movie is singularly Jesse Eisenberg, his voice, his vision, his discipline, his fully realized script and story and tone, his tone is pitch perfect.
To my ear. I don’t know about anyone else’s, but to my ear, it’s the perfect combination of light handed dealing with heavy material. It is the humor that offsets the tragedy and sadness and horror and that together, that umami, that salty, sweet human, what it is to be a human, what it is to be in pain, whether it is, you know, bourgeois pain, mental illness, uh, horrific, historical atrocity, all of those human kinds of pain are all in play, and that they’re all valid, and that to be a human is to be in pain one moment and laughing at yourself or someone else or the situation the next moment, that there is this fluidity to what it is to be a human,
AJT: Or what it is not to be human. The moment the entire cast visits the notorious Majdanek concentration camp outside the Polish city of Lublin and passes before one of its seven gas chambers.
Grey: This place resonated with me. It was not an intellectual thing. It was somatic. It just entered me in a way that was unlike anything else. There was a grief and a horror and a kind of dropping into the energy of what happened to my people that I felt, and I can’t really put it more eloquently than that. It was more of a preverbal, non-verbal experience of deep generational trauma and grief.
But Poland was beautiful, and the Polish people were sublime. The people who now run the concentration camp for visitors were not Jews. They were academics who have devoted their lives to making sure that people not forget what happened. It was as pristine and untouched as if maybe everyone had left just that morning. It was a very eerie and spare, shocking, visceral experience.
comments