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Film review

Everything is illustrious

Liev Schreiber's directorial debut uses lovely moments and a talented cast to turn a novel some called unadaptable into a moving film.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published October 20, 2005

[Photo: Warner Bros.]

Eugene Hutz plays Alex in director Liev Schreiber’s Everything Is Illuminated. Moments of haunting beauty punctuate a movie that is at times amusing, dark and subtle. You be the critic - Take our reader movie critic poll

Everything Is Illuminated begins as an absurdist comedy and ends with darker realism, a difficult path for any filmmaker to navigate, especially a first-timer like Liev Schreiber. Nobody will accuse the actor of lacking ambition, directing his adaptation of a novel previously considered unfilmable.

It's an auspicious debut, full of wonderful little moments that only an assured artist would discover. Some are verbal, lifted from Jonathan Safran Foer's book, such as the mangled English translations of a Russian tour guide named Alex. Others are visual; sunflowers in the midst of nowhere, and a wall of sealed, otherwise insignificant artifacts from the life of Alex's latest customer who shares the author's name.

The movie's Jonathan (Elijah Wood) hires Alex, played memorably by gypsy punk rocker Eugene Hutz, to find the Ukrainian village where his Jewish grandfather was saved during the Holocaust by an unknown woman. It's a somber journey by description, but only until the road trip begins.

Alex is forced to take along his own grandfather (Boris Leskin), who drives despite claiming to be blind, a quirk that includes his dog, his "seeing-eye bitch" named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Grandfather makes a living taking Jews like Jonathan to their heritage, but he's anti-Semitic, taxing Alex's English to soften the meaning for a paying customer. Grandfather can't believe it when Jonathan mentions Sammy Davis Jr. was Jewish, but he still loves the dog.

Foer's novel reportedly included detailed histories of Ukrainian villages and families preceding Jonathan's story by centuries. Schreiber's screenplay ditches all that, opting for a few World War II flashbacks to focus attention on the grandfathers and their descendents. Literary purists may grumble, but it's a fine job of streamlining for cinematic needs.

The first two-thirds of Everything is Illuminated is the kind of quietly rambling, deceptively nonsensical story that Jim Jarmusch or maybe Wes Anderson creates. The film's shift to more serious themes than Jonathan's vegetarianism and Sammy Davis Jr. Jr's flatulence should go smoother. The last act of Schreiber's film contains subtle surprises clarifying everything, but attention may be lost by some viewers along the way.

That's especially true for viewers expecting something cuddly from Wood, making a deliberate detour from Lord of the Rings territory. He's in minimalist mode here, barely reacting to strange things around him. Wearing the thick glasses of a born observer, he also dons the suit of someone too uptight to do anything about what he sees. I'm sure Wood's performance is what Schreiber wants, but I'm not convinced it's what the movie needs.

Hutz and Leskin are quite a team, though. Alex's feeble attempts at Westernized cool are the polar opposite of his grandfather's stubborn heritage. The conflict is their chemistry, even when events during the journey calm it down. A late appearance by Laryssa Lauret, like Leskin a European actor pulled from obscurity by Schreiber, signals a successful end to the film's difficult tonal arc.

Everything is Illuminated is flawed yet always interesting, lovely to behold - Matthew Libatique's cinematography is award caliber - and eventually quite moving. Above all, it has a genuinely dedicated creator in Schreiber, whose instincts seem to come from another time and certainly a place other than Hollywood. This may be regarded as the best foreign film created by an American this year. That must count for something.

Grade: A-

Director: Liev Schreiber

Cast: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, Laryssa Lauret

Screenplay: Liev Schreiber, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer

Rating: R; profanity, disturbing images, violence, sexual situations

Running time: 106 min.

[Last modified October 19, 2005, 10:43:05]