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Everything is Illuminated
USA, 2005
[Liev Schreiber]
Eugene Hutz, Elijah Wood, Boris Letsin
Drama / Comedy
26th Sept 2006
While at first it may seem strange that Liev Schreiber, a marginally talented actor of no great renown, should be helming a movie, any movie. That he would choose this project, a book adaptation about an American man returning to the Ukraine of his grandfather in order to find the woman who saved his life during the Holocaust, would seem even more puzzling. However, Schreiber has Ukrainian heritage, indeed his own grandfather was born there, and so in many ways this is a fitting, personal project for him. While it is never made overtly clear it is possible that the character, Jonathan Safran Foer, is as much Schreiber as it is its creator, also named Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of the novel. Confusing I know.

Foer the character is an obsessive collector, hording every memento and cast-off from his own family and pinning them in air-tight Ziploc bags to his walls. After receiving one particular gift from his aging grandmother, he realizes that whilst all his other relatives are well-represented, his late grandfather has but one notice to his existence. An old photograph of him and a woman named Augustine, who his grandmother tells him saved his grandfather from the Nazi SS death squads rampaging through the Ukraine in 1942. Desiring to travel to Trachimbrod, the small village that his ancestors came from, he contacts a local firm in Odessa that specializes in guiding Jewish visitors through their pasts. Here begins an interesting story.

Everything is Illuminated is as you would expect from a low-budget, high-brow indie-production: it is beautifully shot, it is often very quiet, and it has moments of fine comedy occasionally peeking through what would otherwise be a very somber affair. The central character may be Foer, but our narrator, and the man with most to say, is his guide Alex (Hutz), a young Ukrainian man obsessed with out-of-date American pop culture. It is his brilliantly fractured English and surprisingly open, friendly demeanor that guides us through the movie�s revelations. Elijah Wood, playing opposite, often says little, a foreigner in a foreign land whom no one but Alex can understand. Accompanying them on their trip is Alex�s grandfather, whose reluctance and bellicosity hides a dark secret, and his guide dog (though he is not blind), or seeing-eye bitch as Alex calls it, Sammy Davis Jnr Jnr.

For fans of the book the movie may come as something of a disappointment (don�t they always?), doing away as it does with half of the books content. Foer�s novel within a novel tale about Trachimbrod, the town the disparate threesome travel to, is cut entirely, and the film becomes a straight roadtrip of personal and historical enlightenment. However, because of this it becomes a much more accessible fare, and the challenges and changes the three men overcome are pleasingly rendered by Schreiber. The finale, in which the grandfather becomes the central figure and his long-hidden past is revealed, is exquisitely unexpected, and you truly get the sense that they are all different men for it. I would happily recommend this to anyone.
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