Everything Is Illuminated - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'Everything Is Illuminated': Wrong director, wrong material

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Everything is not merely illuminated in the new film, "Everything is Illuminated." It's beamed out with all the subtlety of a klieg light.

Based on Jonathan Safran Foer's novel of the same name, the movie both tries too hard and not hard enough. Early comic sequences are grossly overdone while wondrous moments in which the past takes primacy over the present aren't fully explored.

Warner Independent Pictures

'Everything Is Illuminated'

The verdict: Isolated moments of wonder, but many more are cloying and self-congratulatory.

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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Elijah Wood stars as, well, Jonathan Safran Foer, who dresses like an insurance salesman, circa 1961, and wears Coke-bottle-thick glasses thatmake his eyes look like enormous blue poker chips. Jonathan is a collector. He fills his walls with Ziplocked remnants of his family heritage — false teeth, a grasshopper in alabaster, a dollar bill, bottle caps ...

But it's a photo handed to him by his dying grandmother that sends him to the Ukraine to find the woman who helped his grandfather escape the Nazis. His so-called guides are: Alex (Eugene Hutz), a young Eastern European who loves all things American, wears a tacky track suit and speaks mangled English; and Alex's grandfather (Boris Leskin), a cranky anti-Semite who insists he's blind (even though he's the designated driver) and brings along his "seeing-eye dog," Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., played by a scene-stealing Border Collie mix.

They represent a shady outfit with the lofty name of Heritage Tours, which has pretty much made a killing off wealthy Jewish Americans returning to find their roots. Or what's left of them.

To Alex and his grandfather, it's business as usual. Show him everyone is dead and go home. But this trip will turn out to be something different.

Cue the Klezmer music that just ... won't ... stop. Until things get schmaltzy.

"Everything is Illuminated" is like bad Jim Jarmusch, drenched in chicken soup and Catskills humor, circa "Dirty Dancing."

Actor-turned-director, Liev Schreiber (it's his first feature), has an extensive Broadway background and brings a theatrical flair to his vision of the novel. Apparently, he's filmed only a slice of material that has generally been regarded as far too complicated to make into a movie.

It's easy to applaud Schreiber for his sincerity, his commitment, his intelligence, his compassion. But his movie can be embarrassing.

However, late in the film — almost too late — there's a wondrous sequence that seems to have wandered over from Tim Burton's exquisite "Big Fish." The travelers come upon a tiny, picture-perfect cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sea of sunflowers, with crisp white laundry billowing in the wind.

Inside is an elderly woman (Laryssa Lauret) who tends to stacks of boxes labeled "Spectacles," "Wooden Tops," etc. Most tellingly, there's even a box marked "Dust." She too, it turns out, is a collector.

The time we spend with her is haunting. For a brief instant, everything truly is illuminated, bathed in the light of a past that cannot be tucked away forever. Our need to know who we are (or were) won't leave us alone, even when we've renounced our true selves.

This isn't a frivolous film or a dumb one. Mostly, it feels like a mistake — the wrong director matched with the wrong material.

Newcomer Hutz, a member of Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band, comes on like a young John Turturro, all high energy and nervy acting choices. Conversely, it's difficult to judge Wood's performance, given the rigid context of his role. He has every right to try to escape Frodo's shadow with parts like the sicko in "Sin City" or enigmas like Jonathan.

But did the most important object in this movie have to be a ring?