Everything Is Illuminated - Austin American-Statesman movie review

'Everything Is Illuminated': Characters, emotions keep audience engaged

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

In his first film as a director, acclaimed actor Liev Schreiber (2004's "The Manchurian Candidate") discards half of the best-selling novel he is adapting, "Everything Is Illuminated." Gone is the magical-realist account of a few decades in the life of a vanished Ukranian village. When it comes to history, Schreiber is mainly interested in the memories of a generation that is only now dying away.

Warner Independent Pictures

'Everything Is Illuminated'

3 out of 5 stars

Director: Liev Schreiber
Starring: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret
Run time: 100 minutes
Release date: Sept. 16, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for disturbing images/violence, sexual content and language.
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The contemporary portion of Jonathan Safran Foer's book is narrated by Alex, the dubiously qualified translator who leads an American in search of the village his grandfather fled during the Holocaust. Readers who found Alex's tortured English annoying rather than funny needn't worry much: In the movie, where Alex is one of three main characters instead of the sole storyteller, his malapropisms serve as easily appreciated comic relief.

Still, Alex is the best thing about the film. Novice actor Eugene Hutz (frontman for the gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello) does right by the character, nailing his faux-confident swagger and his charming eagerness to please a sophisticated American.

Hutz bridges the gap between his two co-stars. As the American, Elijah Wood is a caricature of obsessive introspection. Wearing a crisp black suit, spit-combed hair and huge spectacles that make a joke out of his saucer-sized eyes, Wood has a habit of plucking up bits of detritus and preserving them in Ziploc bags, hoping to collect a tangible chronicle of fleeting emotions. He's a weirdo, in other words, where the novel's hero was your average overeducated New York writer-to-be. This decision is harder to justify than the film's focus on the present, in that we have a more difficult time identifying with Wood, who even in the best circumstances is not the world's most accessible actor.

Making Wood a cartoon, though, does shift some attention to the story's hidden source of pathos, Alex's unnamed Grandfather (Boris Leskin). Ostensibly the hired driver on this expedition, Grandfather obviously has some ties to the town he's been hired to find. If the film is coy about its interest in Grandfather's history, it's only because Schreiber wants its eventual revelation to be, well, revelatory — and while the emotional climax is handled in a fairly conventional way, Schreiber succeeds in humanizing the character, who is a stand-in for all the real-world old men and women who are reluctant to talk about their World War II experiences.

Like many an actor-turned-director, Schreiber is eager to show he has an artistic vision. As a result, "Everything Is Illuminated" is a sometimes distractingly stylized film, boasting perfect acres of sunflowers and meticulous arrays of collected junk. The value of all this is debatable, but Schreiber never loses sight of the human emotions that made him care about this story in the first place.