Everything Is Illuminated - Palm Beach Post movie review

'Everything is Illuminated' shines

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

The gravitational pull of a young man's curiosity about his namesake grandfather sets in motion an eccentrically comic road trip in Everything is Illuminated.

But since the journey takes bespectacled Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) geographically from Brooklyn to the Ukrainian countryside and back in time from today to the Holocaust, expect that smile to soon be wiped from your face.

Warner Independent Pictures

'Everything Is Illuminated'

A-

The verdict: A comic, then sobering clash of cultures in a young American's ancestral odyssey.

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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Despite the eventual sober conclusion of Jonathan's trek, the odyssey also marks the heartening arrival of an adept new filmmaker, actor-turned-director-and-screenwriter Liev Schreiber (The Manchurian Candidate). Devotees of Foer's novel, on which the film is based, may carp about how much has been excised, but that undervalues the gem-like cutting with a masterful tonal shift that remains. As a first effort, Schreiber achieves a great deal, drawing fine performances from veterans and amateurs alike, inventing a visual style that complements the story's abstract tangents and lowering the emotional boom when appropriate.

As a tribute to his own Ukrainian grandfather, Schreiber has carved out the story of an anal American writer, so obsessed with the artifacts of his family's history that he gathers old photographs and found objects, seals them in plastic bags and tacks them to his wall. Either he is an archivist or perhaps he has put his own life on hold, preferring to collect remnants of the past. But a particular fascination with a snapshot of his grandfather as a young man, posing with a mysterious woman named Augustine, motivates Jonathan to fly off to the Old Country in search of his dark, ancestral roots.

There he is scooped up by Alex Perchov (Eugene Hutz, making a memorably loopy film debut), a gypsy tour guide as off-the-wall vibrant as Jonathan is subdued. Alex's company specializes in serving "rich Jews searching for their dead families" — a thriving niche — and since he dreams of one day moving to America, it is little wonder he cannot fathom Jonathan's interest in Ukraine.

Still, off they go, Jonathan, Alex, Alex's sad-eyed grandfather and his dog, named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior (Don't ask.) With only the name of a long-since-obliterated shtetl and a tiny photo, they are determined to find evidence of Augustine. Like many a road trip, the traveling can be as valuable as the destination, as the world speeds by in hallucinatory images, glimpsed but not always understood. Eventually, with the improbability that fuels much of Everything is Illuminated, they do indeed arrive at the desired site, an epiphany for both young men of such contrasting backgrounds.

Wood, so associated with the burden of the world in Lord of the Rings, gives a weightier performance here, though one with wryly comic edges surrounding a tragic core. Directed to keep his facial expressions to a minimum, Wood still manages to draw us in and serve as an empathy magnet.

He all but cedes the screen to Hutz, who could have stolen the film from a more kinetic costar. Garbed in a flashy American track suit, spouting a vocabulary culled from swallowing a thesaurus, Hutz plays an Eastern European Everyman yearning to emigrate, apparently not far off from his real self.

Still, the triumph of Everything is Illuminated belongs to Schreiber, who gets points for succeeding at his daunting challenge, as well as for the chutzpah of the effort. And there is still plenty left of Foer's book for him to make another film of what remains.