Actor-turned-first-time-filmmaker Liev Schreiber tosses out most of what made Jonathan Safran Foer's too-clever-by-half debut novel so precious, rooting out the heart of Foer's story from the precocious bombast. Unfortunately, he preserves the conceit that the hero of the story is also named Jonathan Safran Foer (beguilingly played by a pale Elijah Wood in thick, oversize glasses and an undertaker's black suit), a genealogy-obsessed writer who saves every bit of family-related detritus — bottle caps, a grasshopper suspended in amber, his grandmother's dentures — in Ziploc baggies, arranging it all into a vast, polyethylene mosaic that tells the story of how...
Released:
2005
Rated:
PG-13
Length:
104 mins