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Friday, September 23, 2005
Touching 'Illuminated' keeps it light
When actor Liev Schreiber was in Seattle to promote "The Sum of All Fears" in 2002 he was ecstatic because he had just acquired the rights to Jonathan Safran Foer's acclaimed novel "Everything Is Illuminated." In bringing the idiosyncratic book about a young man's quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis to the screen, he was both writer and director.
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View all photosThe result is a surreal comedy that turns into a touching road movie with Elijah Wood as the young man (Jonathan), neat and self-contained as a chrysalis in a cocoon. He's besieged with phobias and, instead of living life, collects its mementos and memories, safely zipper-locked into baggies, dated and pinned upon a large wall. When his grandmother hands him a folded photo of his granddad and a mysterious woman, he does something out of the ordinary: He journeys to the Ukraine to find a town that may no longer exist in order to assemble a chapter from his family's past.
If this sounds like a despairing "Holocaust movie," it's brazenly and oddly not. The first third of the film, though it begins a little shakily and takes a reel to get its feet, is absurd and unpredictable.
Jonathan, hiring an "ancestry tour" service out of Odessa to help him find the wayward place from which his grandfather escaped, discovers his guides are a "blind" and bigoted old man (Boris Leskin), his fractured-English speaking, "Sopranos"-clothed hipster grandson, Alex (Eugene Hutz, of the Ukrainian Gypsy punk band "Gogol Bordello") and a demented, Seeing Eye dog.
In the book, Alex is the narrator and much of its charm is seeing his world through his humorous, scrambled-egg version of English. If he seems a caricature initially, he changes over the course of the journey, harboring secrets, looking for answers enveloped in feeling. Though Wood is the star, it's Hutz who is the indelible presence.
Visually, Schreiber moves smoothly between past and present and frames the film in a palette that is first monochromatic and then slowly becomes brighter as Jonathan finds the horrific, finally hopeful, truth.
There's an innate integrity in the film's simplicity and it sheds quirk in favor of poignant ruminations about family and the quixotic notion that we are all connected in the dark hell of horror and light in that privileged place called hindsight.
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