EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

As an actor, Liev Shreiber brings thoughtful and expressive intensity to his roles. Rarely the leading man, he tends to upstage big name stars with his smartly nuanced and eccentric performances. It comes as no surprise that for his directorial debut, he chose to adapt a novel most would consider unfilmable.

Jonathan Safram Foer’s surprise bestseller, Everything Is Illuminate, has been called “madly complex,” “historically layered” and “filled with great linguistic imagination.” Hardly the siren’s call for a Hollywood translation. Prudently, Shreiber amputated one of the novel’s dual plot lines and focused the story, but takes few chances with the material. The film is long on quirks and lovely images but short on urgency or sense of purpose.

Jonathan Foer (Elijah Wood) is an obsessive family “collector.” Armed with a fanny pack full of Ziplocs he bags random bits of personal detritus --an antique brooch, a boiled potato, a hand full of soil-- in an attempt to capture his history. Upon learning that his mysterious grandfather was rescued from the Nazis, he takes off on a “rigid search” to find the woman who saved him. Traveling from one remote Ukrainian village to another, he is accompanied by Alex (Eugene Hutz), a young hipster guide prone to amusing malapropisms, Alex’s scowling and anti-Semitic grandfather (Boris Leskin) and Sammy Davis Junior Jr, the grandfather’s anti-social “seeing-eye bitch.” What starts as a comedic and haphazard quest for one family’s story turns into a deeper examination of the personal and political importance of memory, that one cannot ignore or escape the past no matter how painful the truth.

Shreiber’s offbeat approach to the narrative lands somewhere between The Wizard Of Oz and Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law and for about two thirds of the film it works pretty well. Understanding that road movies are more about the journey than the destination, the director handles the character’s rapidly shifting insights with finesse and offers up terrific moments of comedic cross-cultural bonding. However, the film seems to have misplaced its guts, and in the final reel, Jonathan's quest crosses the line into unearned sentimentality. The history and secrets revealed, while moving, seem out of place and ultimately ring false.

The small ensemble is terrific. Wood, dressed in a dark suit and oversized glasses, is a precise little exclamation point of a man. He says little, but his presence is always striking, and makes a great straight man for Hutz's charismatic doofus Alex. Bursting with nervous energy and frantic gestures, Hutz, a first time actor (he's the singer for the gypsy punk band, Gogol Bordello) is eminently watchable. Leskin masterfully navigates the grandfather's comic personality but because of Shreiber's script misses the darker implications of his character.

This isn't a vanity project; there are no "actorly" moments or over-the-top statements. Shreiber is reaching for something substantial and even profound: to emphasize importance of memory, and our responsibility to pass the lessons of the Holocaust from one generation to the next. But while he avoids grand revelations and heated melodrama, he forgets to provide a proper context for the grief and pain. A more daring commitment to both the story's humor and pathos might have provided greater insight and turned a modest success into something truly worth remembering.