Everything Is Illuminated

Starring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin.
Written and directed by Liev Schreiber.
(Rated PG-13, 104 min.)

What does a neatly dressed, introverted American searching the Ukrainian countryside for his Jewish forebears have in common with a disco-dancing hipster from Odessa and his blind grandfather who drives a rusty jalopy with a seeing-eye dog in the back seat?

Not much but, as they say about families, it’s the ties that bind. Everything Is Illuminated is a story about a journey through a family’s history and the incongruous—and deeply funny—situations that make the journey memorable.

Jonathan (Elijah Wood) isn’t related to any of these crazy Ukrainians who take him on this private tour but they share a common thread in history that broke violently one day in 1942 when Nazis wiped a shtetl off the map and murdered its inhabitants.

Although tinged with darkness and misfortune, Everything Is Illuminated is surprisingly upbeat as it winds its way through its tale.

Jonathan is a lifelong collector of things that tie him to his relatives—photos, hair clippings, false teeth, anything he can get his hands on—which he stores in Ziploc bags that he thumbtacks to his bedroom wall.

One day he gets an old photograph of his grandfather—of whom he is the spitting image—and a pregnant woman posing in a field. This photo haunts Jonathan. He must find out who she is—identified only on the back as Augustine—and how come his father survived the pogrom and immigrated to the United States.

Meanwhile in Odessa, Alex (Eugene Hutz) and his family conduct private tours for “rich Jews” who want to trace their family’s paths back to the villages where they came from. Alex, who yearns for America, doesn’t see any sense in coming all the way to his country just to look at a bunch of gravestones. But it’s the family business, which his grandfather (Boris Leskin) started, and now his authoritarian father (Oleksandr Choroshko) runs. No one in the family thinks much of the Americans they drive around the countryside but they’re happy to take their money.

As Alex and his grandfather become familiar with the odd American in their midst, however, they come to respect him more. In fact, they discover they have more in common with him than they ever suspected.

Although this film is based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer—also the name of the main character—it actually involves just a few elements of this complex and multilayered story. Considering how inventive this film is, one can only imagine how fun the whole novel is—probably why it was a bestseller a couple of years ago. Not bad for a first-time novelist in his 20s.

Not too shabby for debut director Liev Schreiber either (most recently seen in The Manchurian Candidate), who wrote this first-time screenplay. Everything Is Illuminated shows he’s more than up to the task of telling an emotionally rich story in an interesting manner.

The dialog sounds like it was penned for the ear, not just to propel the plot. Alex always calls Jonathan “Jonfan” because that’s how he hears the name. His vocabulary belies its likely manner of instruction too—using old novels and poetry instead of language tapes. He says repose a lot, for example, instead of sleep. And grandpa’s seeing-eye dog—named Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr. of all things—is always the “seeing-eye bitch.”

There are also the inevitable cultural clashes. Jonathan’s admission that he’s a vegetarian doesn’t go over well with his meat-eating hosts.

The music becomes a character too, with its soulful recurring theme by Tin Hat Trio and lively songs by Gogol Bordello, a Ukrainian “gypsy punk band” fronted by Hutz himself.

The countryside evokes the same past that Jonathan is seeking. Old, rustic, and sad: it’s seen its fair share of pain as well as tender care. Too bad it’s not really the Ukraine landscape but that of the Czech Republic. Such are the realities of Eastern European film production.

Everything Is Illuminated opened October 14 at the Crest Theatre.
Info: www.everythingisilluminatedthemovie.com