Everything Is Illuminated: Frodo's Eurotrip

By Jess Emili

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Liev Schreiber (The Manchurian Candidate, Scream) takes on difficult subject matter in his directorial debut, Everything Is Illuminated: the Holocaust, modern-day anti-Semitism and suicide. However, he balances out the heavy-hearted with the quirky in the story adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's 2001 novel of the same name. A dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Jr., a "deranged" grandfather who pretends to be blind, and a bespectacled, neurotic, Ziploc-bag wielding Elijah Wood take center-stage in a life-altering road trip tale.

In the film version of Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer (played by Wood-The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Back To The Future II), an eccentric young man who "collects" random objects and family mementoes, decides to search for the woman who saved his Jewish grandfather from the Nazis in 1942.

Armed with a photograph of his grandfather and the mystery woman and a bunch of Ziploc bags - for collection purposes -, Jonathan embarks on a cross-cultural journey to the Ukraine. He's employed the help of Heritage Tours, a family-owned business whose specialty is locating long-lost relatives and ancestral homes destroyed during World War II.

At his service are: Alex Perchov, his translator who's not so good at speaking English, Alex's grandfather (also named Alex), his driver who claims he's blind, and Sammy Davis Junior, Jr., the elder Alex's "seeing-eye bitch."

Hutz shines as the American culture-crazed Alex. For Alex, Michael Jackson is still god of the music world and Adidas sweat suits are the hippest clothes around. With lines like "Many girls want to be carnal with me because I am such a premium dancer," Alex's mangling of the English language keeps the first half of the film laugh-out-loud funny. A later dinner scene where Jonathan struggles to explain vegetarianism ("He doesn't eat meat? Not even chickens? Sausage?") is hilarious in an offbeat, Wes Anderson-esque way.

While the language barrier and cultural disparities supply the film with the majority of its laughs, universal themes of familial love, friendship and loss provide poignancy and warmth to Alex's rendering of Foer's extraordinary journey. Schreiber, who also wrote the screenplay, condenses the novel, which comprises 200 years of history, into a film that deals with larger issues on a small, intimate scope. As Jonathan learns about his family's past, the elder Alex comes to terms with his own.

The film's passive protagonist is perhaps its weakest element. Wood plays the straight man to Hutz's flamboyant Alex, but his acting style is almost annoyingly subtle here. He's all dressed up - in a suit and funky glasses - but goes nowhere dramatically. Luckily, his translator steals the show. As cultural differences subside, Hutz's gimmicky yet hilarious idiosyncrasies give way to a poignant performance.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Requiem For A Dream) contrasts vivid modern day imagery with black and white flashbacks to interweave Jonathan and Alex senior's stories. Illuminated's as beautifully filmed as the field of sunflowers that lead its characters to "illumination."

Illuminated is everything it should be: a touching story filled with laughs and warmth. See it, and wish you could preserve all of its goodness in a Ziploc baggie.

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