EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Warner Independent Pictures
Grade: B-
Directed by: Liev Schreiber
Written by: Liev Schreiber, novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
Cast: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 8/24/05

While this is, broadly speaking, yet another Holocaust film,
"Everything Is Illuminated," adapted from Jonathan Safran
Foer's 2002 novel, is more about communication across lines of
class, language and culture. By the story's end, not only does
each character become a different person post-illumination, but
one fellow in particular is comes to a Greek-tragic end after
reflecting on his choice to live a lie. Given the brief running time of the film, Liev Schreiber–who directs his own adaptation of the novel–is able to include only the central features of the book. We’re therefore not given some moments to appreciate some of the magic-realist aspects of the book, e.g. the 18th and 19th century mythical histories involving the principal character’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Brod or anything to speak of about his grandfather’s shtetl, i.e. village housing people of the Jewish persuasion in Eastern Europe. “Fiddler-on-the Roof” dimensions, then, take a back seat, as Schreiber hones in on an unusual road-and-buddy excursion of the kind far removed from that pursued by Seann William Scott’s as the character E.L in Todd Phillips’ comedy “Road Trip.”

Nonetheless the moderately amusing movie does catch some of the resonance of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s folk yarns, in this case as a meditation on familial love and dysfunction alike, friendship across national boundaries, and loss. Happily, the film does not overemphasize the fractured English spoken by the story’s tour guide, who this time around allows us to understand him without the need for clarifying subtitles.

In the movie, as well as in the book, a young traveler by the name of, hmmm, Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood), whose hobby is collecting objects in plastic baggies to remind him of his family history, travels to Ukraine to search for the woman who allegedly saved his grandfather’s life by hiding him from the Nazis in 1942. The guide, who becomes his friend, is a Ukrainian named Alex Perchov (Eugene Hutz). The driver is Perchov’s depressed, irritated and irritating grandfather (Boris Leskin), who insists that he is blind. (He isn’t, not physically, but metaphoric dimensions come into play later on.) Not the least important of the cast is grandfather’s mongrel dog, Sammy David Jr. Jr., who, according to Alex is deranged.

There’s no time in this movie, alas, for more than a cursory exposition of the book’s chapters about Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity, nor do we get to read the reams of letters that Alex and Foer exchange. Instead, we eavesdrop on the many conversations between the American traveler and his Ukrainian counterpart, the former speaking not a word of his host country while the latter does quite a bit better in explaining himself in the language of America that he does in the novel.

Schreiber takes up his story past the Odessa airport where Jonathan’s train pulls in, the American immediately catching that Alex misspelled his name. They take off--Jonathan, granddad and Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. in an impossibly cramped sedan advertising the company as Odessa Jewish Tours. Some people in Ukraine appear to see the money that can be made from Western Jews eager to see and remember the sites where their grandparents met an alarming fate at the hands of the Nazis. During the journey, we’re treated to considerable humor, not just from the manic antics of the dog but from both Alex’s difficulty in understanding how his customer refuses to eat meat and, generally speaking, why Americans bother to come to a country whose citizens would love to get out of permanently and go to the USA.

With just a few black-and-white flashbacks into a horrendous slaughter that involved Jonathan’s granddad, Schreiber allows the warm humor, the occasional hilarity, and the soul-searching epiphanies to take center stage. Elijah Wood, in a grown-up role as a student about the age of twenty with oversize, dorky eyeglasses, looks like the stereotypical nice Jewish boy, while Eugene Hutz, better known as a singer from the punk rock band “Gogol Bordell,” turns in a creditable debut role sounding like Latka from the TV series, “Taxi.” For the record, Hutz was born in Kiev, making his way to the U.S. by trekking through Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Poland, having left the Ukrainian village of Striy at the age of fourteen.

The film would ideally have been made in Ukraine but for that country’s lack of back-up equipment, Prague and environs substitute quite well.

Rated PG-13. 102 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com