Everything is Illuminated
Studio: Warner Independent Pictures
Rated: PG-13
Website: http://wip.warnerbros.com/everythingisilluminated/
Release Date: 2005-10-14
Cast: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
Director: Liev Schreiber
Screenwriter: Liev Schreiber
WorkNameSort: Everything is Illuminated
Our Rating: 3.50
There are two things you can do with a memento. One is to squirrel it away inside a glass curio cabinet, keeping it as pristine and safe from wear as the memories you’re trying to protect. The other is to throw caution to the wind, admit that life is messy and put that sucker to daily use. Because historic value or no, what good is a trinket you can’t enjoy or touch?
Everything Is Illuminated, the film version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s keepsake-obsessed novel, starts its life as the second kind of memento but ends up the first. You can feel the movie succumbing to the siren song of inert, vacuum-sealed preciousness almost as soon as its first act is over. But before then, it’s something to behold.
Smart hilarity reigns as Foer’s onscreen counterpart (Elijah Wood), an American Jew with a penchant for preserving family-related artifacts in Ziploc bags, arrives in the Ukraine to find the woman who once helped his grandfather flee the Nazis. Always dressed in a black suit and owlish spectacles, the meek Jonathan is the perfect straight man for the tour guides he’s conscripted to lead him to the obscure shtetl of Trachimbrod. Young Alex (Eugene Hutz) is a dimwitted hip-hop fan whose frequent malapropisms and alleged swinging lifestyle make him the spiritual inheritor to Aykroyd and Martin’s wild and crazy guys, while his grandfather (Boris Leskin) is a curt old codger who expects everyone to go along with the work-saving fiction that he’s been struck blind. They also have a dog, which grandpa has named after Sammy Davis Jr. and which wears its status as “Officious Seeing Eye Bitch” on its furry back.
The beauty of the setup is simple: Alex and his grandpa have no idea how to relate to their foreign client – and grandpa isn’t trying all that hard. At least Alex asks questions, like how much a “Negro heterosexual accountant” typically makes in the good old egalitarian U.S.A. As they traverse the lush Ukrainian countryside, the trio hammer out a relationship that never sinks to the level of contempt yet sure isn’t Brotherhood Week – and, as such, speaks more directly and eloquently to the tantalizing ambiguities of peace, love and understanding than does an entire library of message pictures.
But grandpa’s abrupt decision that he likes the young American after all broadcasts the movie’s transition to a “nicer,” more “sensitive,” more “important” and altogether less interesting piece of work. The tone of cross-cultural snarkiness gets abandoned somewhere on the road to Trachimbrod, where we will learn crucial backstory not only about Jonathan’s grandfather, but Alex’s as well. Prepare for mild disappointment, partly due to the familiarity of the story arc and partly due to its suddenly humorless, excessively vague handling. First-time writer/director Liev Schreiber fails to find an adequate cinematic vocabulary for the sort of introspection that novels thrive on. He dallies with voiceover, dreamlike memory sequences and stark visual symbolism, yet vital linkages of narrative and character remain unmade; instead, we’re left feeling like heels for wishing we were still getting more of that whipsaw banter we had earlier found so cathartic.
Ultimately, Schreiber treats Illuminated‘s post-Holocaust life lessons like delicate pearls, wrapping them in gauzy sentiment and admonishing us that they’re fine to admire from a distance but far too valuable to play with. Fair enough, but those weren’t the rules when we sat down.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.