Everything Is Illuminated

When Jonathan Safran Foer's book Everything Is Illuminated came out a few years ago, I read reviews of it and peeked at the book a few times, but I didn't sit down with the novel and really give it my attention. It looked like fun, but I could see why some reviewers found it too gimicky or cute with its quirky and surprising use of words as illustrations, which some found distracted them from the story. When I heard that one of my favorite actors, Liev Schreiber, was adapting and directing a film version of the story, I was delighted; he's a talented, versatile actor and his interviews are witty, self-deprecating and entertaining. I figured he would bring something fresh and original to the story. The result was lovelier, funnier and more touching than I imagined it would be, and with this single film his place in my heart as a favorite director as well as a fine actor is now permanent.

The film version of Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood, who plays Jonathan Safran Foer, the writer of the novel and the fictionalized main character. Wood is well cast; his performance is appropriately odd and moving, and his discomfort in the world as well as in his own skin are palpable and amusing. A stranger in a strange land, he is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to see where his late grandfather lived before the Holocaust and to try to meet the woman who saved his grandfather from death. The result is one of the funniest and most touching road pictures I've seen. Jonathan's awkwardness, anxiety and obsessiveness are strangely compelling, and Elijah Wood's performance is certainly worth seeing.

However, the performance that steals the picture and makes me laugh out loud in astonished delight is by the wonderful Ukrainian actor and singer Eugene Hutz. The long-faced Hutz is also the front man for a band called Gogol Bordello, whose music sounds like a fabulous conglomeration of klezmer tunes, gypsy folk music and punk. British comedian Phill Jupitus describes this gypsy punk band as "a bit like The Clash having a fight with The Pogues in Eastern Europe." Their biggest hit, "Start Wearing Purple," plays out the movie during the final credits, and it is as startlingly, infectiously surprising and life-affirming as the film before it. The juxtaposition of amusingly jaded lyrics with drunken wedding-party-style singing fits the feel of the movie perfectly in true traditional Eastern European fashion: life is hard, my youth will vanish and my sanity will follow, so let's start living right now!

Hutz plays Alex, a Ukraininan in his 20s who lives at home with his parents, his grandfather, and his grandfather's beloved dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior. (Yes, two juniors.) His father's company gives half-assed tours to American Jews touring the Ukraine seeking connection with their lost ancestors. Alex acts as translator and runs interference between his cranky old grandfather, who insists that he is blind but who chauffers confused tourists unwillingly in a run-down compact car, Sammy Davis Junior Junior at his side. Alex has supreme confidence in his style and brilliance and, gangly and ridiculous though he may be in his track suit and attempts at American-style bling, he is convinced of his extraordinary sex appeal. And somehow, like Tim Curry dressed in Transylvanian drag in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his confidence and lust for life make him sexy. To watch this lanky young man saunter down the street in a scene that parodies the opening to Saturday Night Fever, calling out to admiring passersby and telling you what a premium dancer he is, you can believe that he really is as "premium" as he believes himself to be.

The adventures shared by Alex, his grandfather, Sammy the dog and "Jonfen," as Alex calls Jonathan, are fun and surprising, but also ultimately meaningful and moving, to us as well as to them. Actor Liev Schreiber brings a sense of humor and decency to many of his roles; he has a great talent for making his characters so real, so in-the-moment, that any audience would be hard pressed not to be touched by the stories of the men he plays in movies like A Walk on the Moon (one of my favorites) and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Everything Is Illuminated he shows us that he has the same gift for creating a whole film that he has for creating a compelling character.