At the beginning of the movie "Everything Is Illuminated," adapted from the novel of Jonathan Safran Foer '99, much is left unclear. Foer, played by an awkwardly quiet, but inquisitive Elijah Wood, is given a topaz amulet by his dying grandmother. Before Foer can ask what the object is, his grandmother dies.
Luckily, Foer is an avid collector of things — underwear, dirt, hairpins — odd, peculiar, but not unnecessary things. He puts them in Ziploc bags, places them on his wall, labels who they belong to (consequently implying why he keeps them) and then connects the dots, creating a family web of sorts.
Based on various knickknacks and an old family picture, the amulet seems to have been the centerpiece of a necklace worn by Foer's dead grandfather's lover in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Knowing little of his Jewish history — how his grandfather lived, survived, and nearly died in the Holocaust — Foer travels to Ukraine to, well, illuminate his past.
This much is gleaned from the pages of Foer's book, which was also his senior thesis. From here on out, the story is as much the director and writer's, Liev Schreiber, as it is Foer's. The question now is whether the film version, which sheds many of the subplots, characters and narrative voices that helped make the book a bestseller, can succeed in its much-altered form.
It can, and it does. For most of the film, Schreiber takes us on road trip with three characters — Foer, his Ukrainian tour guide Alex (Eugene Hutz), and Alex's unnamed grandfather (Boris Leskin), who drives. On the way, they travel across a formerly war-torn but now lush and revitalized Ukraine (actually filmed in the Czech Republic), which plays as central a role as the three characters. Though the story begins as Foer's mission to discover his Jewish roots, he learns just as much about Ukraine, its gentiles and its Jews.
And particularly, Alex's grandfather. Throughout the film, this mysterious, obstinate old man subjects Foer to numerous incendiary acts. Foer is dismissively referred to as "Jew;" the canine-phobic Foer is only allowed to ride in the back seat with the grandfather's snarling dog, Sammy Davis Jr., Jr.; and when Foer, a vegetarian, drops the lone animal-free food he can find for dinner – a boiled potato – the grandfather picks it up and feeds it to the dog.
Schreiber, the director, is keen enough to avoid turning the grandfather's acts into obvious accounts of anti-Semitism. The film's music, an irresistible mix of Jewish klezmer and contemporary gypsy punk (actually performed by Hutz's real-life band, Gogol Bordello), plays against the grandfather's maliciousness. When he is condescending, the music is jovial; when he stares Foer down, the music pokes fun at his absurdity. It begs the question: Why does the grandfather, a driver for the "Jewish Heritage Tours" company, willingly escort people he seems to despise? This mystery thus travels alongside Foer's quest for his past and lends the story its intrigue.
Aside from the film's chief drawback — namely, Elijah Wood's failure to live up to the lead role — it is the allure of discovering the pasts of both Foer and his driver that keeps this 100-minute movie brisk. It is the story of how a young American Jew and an aging Ukrainian bigot can enlighten one another in unseen ways that makes "Everything is Illuminated" worth its mettle, both on the screen and in script.
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