Everything is Illuminated, the movie

Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated is the directorial debut of actor Liev Schreiber who also wrote the screenplay. I read the novel several years ago after falling madly in love with Foer’s mesmerizing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close aka one of the best novels ever written.

Maybe my expectations were too high but I was kind of disappointed by Everything is Illuminated which usually means if the first 100 pages don’t excite me I either a) abandon the book or b) which was the case here, start skimming the pages to get to the end. The result: I know I read the novel but I don’t remember what it was about.

Seeing as I’m a masochistic sucker for book based movies (which are always inferior to the novel), I couldn’t help but torture myself. Everything is Illuminated, the movie however is one of those oddities together with High Fidelity where the movie takes an otherwise bland book to an entirely new stratosphere.

Jonathan Foer (Elijah Wood) obsessively collects items from his family, from toothbrushes to retainers to scraps of paper which he then seals in ziploc bags and pins to a wall in his house to record his family history. He is a collector, scared to lose touch with the past. Before his grandmother dies, she hands him a photograph of his grandfather together with the woman who helped get him out of Ukraine during the Second World War. Jonathan doesn’t have a lot to remember him by and decides to undertake a quest to Ukraine to find the woman, thank her and hopefully learn more about his grandfather. Here he is aided by Alex, his translator who is obsessed with western culture, Alex’ grandfather who is their blind and tormented driver and Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. the grandfather’s slightly “deranged seeing-eye bitch”.



Schreiber, probably best known for his role as Sabletooth in Wolverine, uses both poetic and breathtakingly beautiful imagery, bringing this otherwise ordinary tale to life with a little magic and a lot of grace. He effectively combines both humor and drama and follows the plot of the book quite accurately (or so I’m told), occasionally elaborating on certain events to suit the movie.

Everything is Illuminated is an endearingly quirky road movie that made me laugh out loud during the first half (Eugene Hutz as Alex is simply brilliant) but the closer they get to the tragic truth, the gloomier it gets. It is a dazzling combination of vivid colors, powerful emotions and wonderful performances. In the end, all characters, even the crazy ones, gain their own sparkling illumination in this story about relationships and connection. I laughed, I cried and basically loved it.