New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Friday, September 16th, 2005
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/346714p-295895c.html
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED. With Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz. Director: Liev Schreiber (1:40). PG-13: Language. At Loews Lincoln Square, 19th St. East and Village VII.
Jonathan Safran Foer's epic novel "Everything Is Illuminated" tells the story of multiple generations of a Jewish family originating in a small Ukrainian village in the 18th century.
All that is left of that rich history in actor-turned-filmmaker Liev Schreiber's facile adaptation is the narrative device of the novel, a young New Yorker's search for that village and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
Led by a colorful pair of Ukrainians and their spirited dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior, Jonathan (Elijah Wood) goes, looks and finds what he is looking for in what seems like record time.
Though the village is long gone, its past is stored away in shoeboxes that rise from floor to ceiling in the home of an elderly woman who remembers Jonathan's grandfather as if he were still standing there.
The boxes are labeled with words that will have meaning only to readers of the novel. It's as if two-thirds of the book have been reduced to one-word chapter headings.
Without the history buried in those boxes, the entire story is anti-climactic and sentimentally ineffective.
What makes it passably entertaining are the performances of Eugene Hutz, a Ukrainian musician who plays the irrepressible Alexander, and Boris Leskin, a veteran Russian actor who plays Alex's grandfather.
On the road, Alex is the interpreter keeping peace between his irascible grandfather and the annoyingly inquisitive Jonathan, and Hutz's reading of Alex's hilariously peculiar English from the novel is perfect.
Schreiber says he chose Wood because Jonathan is the eyes of the movie and "I just couldn't think of anybody in show business with better eyes."
Wood's owlish peepers, magnified behind large coke-bottle glasses, are about all he brought to the role. Jonathan is about the most passive protagonist you're likely to see on the screen for a while.
As for Schreiber, a fine actor with sharp intelligence, he can clearly direct. He would have been wiser to start out with a story he could manage on the kind of budget a first-timer can rustle up. "Everything Is Illuminated" is too big to be made so small.