Everything is Illuminated Review

Okay, personal disclosure time. In my mid teens I learned that I carry German-Jewish blood in my veins. The German part of my heritage has been a given my entire life, living as we did in the same town as my oma and opa and my mother's brother and sisters and my many cousins. The frequent family gatherings – every holiday and birthday – often featured more German spoken than English. What had never been spoken of, not even to my mother and her siblings, was that the German side of the family was also Jewish. It was not until after hearing a Jewish public speaker that my grandfather commented that he'd like to get back in touch with that part of his heritage, thereby cluing us in to a hidden and troubled part of our family history. I knew he had been held as a POW during the war before emigrating with his family – my mother was six at the time – but that was all that I had ever known of my grandfather's history up until that time. Though I've never explored that part of my heritage as deeply as I'd like to that hidden history gave Everything is Illuminated a very personal resonance.

Everything is Illuminated is a film about history; how we interact with it, how it shapes us, how it can seep unnoticed into the most unexpected areas. History is what united the film's three principal characters: the young American Jew (Elijah Wood) who lost much of his ancestry to the holocaust and now collects and preserves nearly random artifacts associated with his family members to try and prevent them from slipping away forever, the hysterically banal young Ukrainian man (Gogol Bordello's Eugene Hutz) so caught up in disposable culture that he is completely ignorant of his personal history as well as his country's, the elderly Ukrainian man trying desperately to bury and forget the past.

Based on the autobiographical – well, written from the perspective of it's author anyway, I'm uncertain how much is actually factual - book by Jonathon Safran Foer as adapted and directed by Live Schreiber, Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood in the role of Foer. Since his grandfather – who he is named after – died during his childhood, Foer has been collecting small items that belonged to his relatives, preserving them in Ziploc bags and pinning them to his wall in a sort of obsessive-compulsive shrine. When his grandmother gives Foer a faded photograph of his father with an unknown woman labeled as Augustine – a woman who apparently saved him from the war – Foer sets off to the Ukraine to see if he can find his grandfather's home village and this woman. When he arrives he is guided by Alex - a young Ukrainian man who speaks fantastically fragmented English, wears Kangol hats and Adidas track suits and is wildly fascinated by all things American – and his grandfather, a cranky retired man, now retired, and neurotic to the point that he believes himself blind although perfectly well sighted. Oh … and Grandpa's 'seeing eye bitch', a literally demented mutt named Sammy Davis Jr Jr tags along, too.

The first thing you need to know is that this is not Elijah Woods' film. Yes, he gets top billing. Yes, it's his face on the poster. Yes, he plays the author of the story. But throw that all away. The real lead here is Hutz's Alex and the sooner you clue in to that the better. Woods remains an enigma throughout, functioning almost purely as an observer and a cataloger of events and items, seldom betraying any of his inner world. It is Alex who introduces and closes the film, Alex who drives the narrative, Alex who is the most complex and entertaining figure in the film, Alex who has the most to learn. Woods is on the marquee and Hutz is not because Hutz is a first time actor while Woods is coming off the most successful trilogy of films ever. For the bulk of the film if you are watching Woods you are watching the wrong guy, not because he is bad but because his is actually a supporting role. The guts of the film lie with Hutz and he captures the nuance, subtlety and ridiculous humor of Alex in a flawless performer that should have him working in film as much as he desires and as much as his music career allows.

Not having read the novel this is based upon it is difficult to say how true the adaptation is but my hunch is that it contained a lot of inner dialogue on Foer's part, dialogue that was dropped in the film. It was likely a necessary decision – those sorts of things almost never translate well to film – but it does do the film some damage as Foer is never given a chance to come into his own and the dynamic between him and these multi-generational Ukrainians never develops as fully as it should. He stands more of an image for something else, some lingering survivor guilt or the like, while both Alex and his grandfather are fully formed, living and breathing people. That, however, is the film's only significant flaw.

Schreiber's film and Bengini's Life is Beautiful are the only two films I can think of to successfully meld comedy with a thoughtful exploration of holocaust issues, but while Benigni did it by spending large chunks of the film in a slapstick fantasy world Schreiber has managed the much more difficult feat of rooting his film in actual people, in a recognizably true world. As a result Everything is Illuminated has a far more universal reach than Life Is Beautiful. This is a film that looks beyond the holocaust, into the life that follows such an event, and what it has to say about our hidden pasts and the way long gone generations can have an effect on the here and now reaches far beyond the setting of this particular film. It has its flaws and is not the knockout that it could have been as a result but Everything is Illuminated is a very, very good film filled with pathos and humor and a blazing performance from Hutz.