“The bitch and the Jew will share the back seat!”
Hearing this quote early in the movie, you realize that Everything is Illuminated doesn’t make any pretense of conventionality in its approach to that most clich? topic in modern art: the Holocaust. Making a movie about the Holocaust that addresses the subject with the gravity and power it deserves after Schindler’s List is like trying to make a Mafia movie after The Godfather. You either have to blatantly plagiarize or you have to go in a radical new direction.
Director and screenwriter Liev Schreiber chose the latter, taking Jonathan Safran Foer’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same title and running with it. The story is simple: A nervous, emotionless Foer (Elijah Wood) travels to the Ukraine in search of his family’s pre-World War II home, accompanied by a twentysomething man and his grandfather, two Ukrainian tour guides with histories of their own.
The first challenge-and joy-in the movie is the narration. The story is told from the point of view of Alex, the younger Ukrainian guide, whose heavily accented and eccentric English irritates at first but gives way to comic relief and, strangely, a kind of heartfelt emotion. During their “very rigid search,” Alex’s verbal gymnastics-”Are you carnal very often?” “My English is not so premiere”-are taken directly from Foer’s evocative book, a smart choice on Schreiber’s part. However, his decision to include Foer’s clever chapter titles was a poor one-their cuteness adds nothing but running time to the movie.
The film starts off comically, with jokes about the culture-clash between Foer and the Ukrainians. Wood’s acting, at once cartoonish and lifeless, is a drag on the movie, as was the director’s decision to keep him in a suit throughout the film. Luckily, Alex and his grandfather steal the show. Crammed into a tiny car with a crazed dog, the threesome starts a comic journey toward Foer’s family shtetl (homestead), accompanied by a fine musical score that draws heavily on Eastern European musical influences, both old and new, to create a fitting soundtrack.
Indeed, the conflict between old and new is the heartbeat of this movie: How does a new generation, both in America and Europe, come to terms with the Holocaust? As the trip continues and the relationship between the three men grows, so does the tension between Alex and his grandfather, whose secrets loom ever larger. I won’t spoil the plot further, but the movie is at its finest exploring the generational divide between those affected by the Holocaust directly and indirectly. The film captures this in the awkward relations between a family making a living from the memory of the Holocaust and Foer’s emotionally damaged third-generation victim.
Critics have lambasted the film’s shift from comedy to drama in the middle of the action, but that genre-transcending move can be daring and humanizing. Aren’t comedy and tragedy two sides of the same coin? The real problems are small, like the director’s attempts to overuse the magical realism film style and an occasional piece of heavy-handed symbolism or narration. Many times Schreiber could have left his actors alone to tell their story, but he sacrificed both comedic and tragic power for trite conceits.
This is a unique film and worth your time, but someone expecting merely a straightforward comedy or a Holocaust drama be warned: The film is human, laughing and crying simultaneously over its shared memories.
