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Everything Is Illuminated

2005, Movie, PG-13, 104 mins

Everything Is Illuminated: Review

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
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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, despite pogroms and Holocausts, Jonathan got to be where he is now. The story that intrigues Jonathan most is that of his late grandfather Safran, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from the tiny shtetl of Trachimbrod who, according to family legend, was saved from the Nazi death squads by a young woman named Angelika. Equipped with a fanny pack filled with Ziploc bags and a faded photograph of Safran and Angelika, Jonathan arrives in Odessa determined to find whatever remains of Trachimbrod, and maybe even Angelika herself. Expecting to be met by responsible representatives of Heritage Tours, the travel service he's hired to escort him deep into the Ukrainian countryside, Jonathan is instead greeted by Alex (brilliant newcomer Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of the "gypsy punk" band Gogol Bordello), a lanky Russian b-boy in gold chains, Adidas sweats and a Kangol cap; Alex's aged grandfather (Boris Leskin) and Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, their flatulent family dog. Alex, who's supposed to be Jonathan's translator, speaks only broken English. His grandfather, who doesn't speak English at all (and perhaps it's just as well; the old man has a way of making the word "Jew" sound like the worst insult in the world), will be their driver, but he claims to be blind. And there's something else about Grandfather that doesn't become clear until they're all on their picaresque journey into the past: He, too, shares a buried connection to the vanished town of Trachimbrod. Gone are Foer's fabulist fables of 18th- and 19th-century shtetl life, which read like a mixture of bad Bashevis Singer and bogus Borges. Schreiber wisely adapts only the portion of the book narrated by Alex, who speaks and writes as if every other word were pulled from a thesaurus. Using words like "rigid" when he means to describe something as difficult, and "illuminated" when he means to say clarified, Alex frequently misses the mark with hilarious, and often poignantly revealing, results. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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