Everything Is Illuminated

This quietly touching film from 2005 was directed by actor Liev Schreiber from his own script, which in turn was adapted from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. It covers familiar territory--a young American Jew goes back to the homeland to seek out his roots, which of course intersect with the atrocities of the Nazis, but I found it to be just off-beat enough to be interesting, with a very powerful final act.

Foer is played by Elijah Wood as a buttoned-up weirdo who has an obsession with collecting mementos, which he keeps in Zip-Loc bags. His ancient grandmother gives him a picture of his grandfather, long deceased, with a young pretty girl taken back in the Ukraine. Foer enlists the dubious assistance of a tour-guide company that specializes in American Jews searching for their roots in order to find that woman. The catch is that the company is run by anti-Semites, and his translator is a goofy young man who has a passion for hip-hop. His English is eclectic at best, using words like "proximal" instead of close and "repose" instead of sleep.

Wood searches for his grandfather's village in the company of this fellow, plus his irascible old grandfather and a demented border collie (named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.). All of this starts to get to be too precious--the translator (Eugene Hutz) is a whisker away from beign one of the "Wild and Crazy Guys" but when the trio find the village, or what's left of it, the tone of the film shifts into one of wistful melancholy, and it works wonderfully. Of course the old grandfather (played wonderfully by Boris Leskin) has a secret, and Hutz reevaluates his attitudes about life in general.

Schreiber has a nice visual style. There are some lovely tableaus, including a farmhouse surrounded by a field of sunflowers. He also makes what must have been a difficult decision--Wood speaks only English, while the other characters, save for Hutz, speak only Russian (or Ukrainian, not sure which). That means whenever Haas is interacting with other characters Hutz must translate. That's a situation that could be trouble for a screenwriter, but Schreiber handles it well. Hutz translates when he has to, but there are moments when it is clear to the audience that Haas understands what others are saying.