Everything Is Illuminated | Review

Schreiber avoids mainstream tourist traps, but struggles to adapt the potentially inadaptable.

At first you’d think that this travelogue that moves back-and-forth in time might come off looking like a raving mad East-Bloc adventure a la Kustrica or perhaps a lighter book-to-screen version of a Hunter S.Thompson novel, but while actor Liev Schreiber’s debut as a director shows a willingness to tackle unfamiliar ground both in terms of filmmaking and adapting a not so ordinary novel, there mysteriously seems to be a severe lack of character. While the ingredients are there to make Everything is Illuminated into an oddball art-house diversion, neither does the black humor or the revisited holocaust survivor tale seem important enough to merit placing this on a must-see before DVD list.

Based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s energetic novel, this recounts the road trip of an offbeat quartet in the form of a self-diagnosed blind grandfather who can drive cars, a translator who comes across as a Beastie Boys reject, an American tourist whose in need of some new bifocals and a four-legged friend with a name so long you wouldn’t want call it twice. Featured in glorious eastern European urbanscapes and mileage on the speedometer is offered by way of a baby blue Lada – the film’s central characters are as far off the map with their personalities as is the final destination of their journey.

Geographically speaking, Schreiber fits the personality of this film with perfectly fitted backdrops – but in a film where a pair of eyeglasses sticks out like a sore thumb, everything else seems subdued. Schreiber’s use of space from close ups to moving crane shots is well executed but sparse are moments that really stick out – it’s traveling without being particularly moving. Perhaps it’s Elijah Wood’s locked-lips ziplock-carrying character who despite his earnest desire to reunite his ancestral past with his clouded future – his character is so dense that he brings little to the road movie or one’s searching for soul movie formula.

There is a moment in the film where the camera shows a highly decorated wall belonging to the home of the protagonist which is then matched by a wall of boxes with personal effects deep in the fields of Ukraine – both sequence instances describe the film as a whole – the elements are there but seem out of place. Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated is an admirable first effort, an odd concoction that audiences won’t hate or love, there is a sense that there was a lot of thought that went into the film – but it doesn’t reach out to the viewer when it supposed to and when it does, it shouldn’t.

Rating 2 stars