Haunted Heritage Tour: Everything Is Illuminated	by George Sax

Eugene Hutz, Elijah Wood and Boris Leski in "Everything Is Illuminated"

Both Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything is Illuminated and the new movie adapted from it by actor Liev Schreiber deal with a very atypical trip abroad by a young Jewish American in search of information about his family’s Ukrainian origins and its members’ fates during the Holocaust.

The novel, however, is also about a great deal more: haunted memories, the uses and repression of history and personal experience, and the manipulation of these materials in art. The novel is about much more than a movie could ever be, no matter who made it.

Turning Foer’s work into a film was an act of deep, perhaps feckless, aesthetic optimism. The book is a virtual catalogue of modernist and post-modernist tricks and tropes. It insistently lacks a “logical,” contiguous narrative, let alone a realistic one. Its most remarked-on device was the creation of a central character named Jonathan Safran Foer, the youth who makes the haunted trip to visit the early scenes of his grandfather’s life in the now-vanished village of Trachimbord.

Schreiber’s movie has its Jonathan, of course, but now he’s really just Elijah Wood, not a self-referential device. First-time director Schreiber (who also wrote the script) has managed to extract, rearrange and paste together enough of the book’s elements to form a narrative, but, unsurprisingly, he hasn’t found an appropriate tone for his film. It shifts moods and pacing abruptly and awkwardly.

After quirky opening scenes in which we’re briefly introduced to Jonathan and his obsessive collecting of both ordinary and strange mementos of his family’s story, the movie quickly moves to Odessa and the Ukrainian family of eccentrics and grotesques (including a “seeing eye” dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.) who have contracted with Jonathan to guide him to the former site of Trachimbord.

The movie is narrated by the eldest son, Alex (Eugene Hutz), Jonathan’s translator, who adores and apes his cockeyed vision of American hip-hop culture. (“Many girls want to be carnal with me because I am such a premier dancer,” he assures us in his somehow stilted yet expressive English.) His grandfather, also Alex (Boris Leski in a vigorous but finely shaded performance), insists he is blind, but is nevertheless prevailed upon to be their driver.

Setting off on the road to misadventure and Trachimbord, Jonathan soon learns his guides don’t have a much better idea of its location than he does. Inevitably, he learns other, more important things, too. As could be foreseen, he and the two Ukrainians have life-altering impacts on each other by the time they reach their geographic and metaphoric destinations.

It must be admitted that much of this is wry, witty, and even touching, if a little blatantly so. But this leaves us groping for meaning in what is perilously close to a shaggy dog road picture about the lingering effects of the Holocaust.

Tethered as he is to a smart, complex, and self-conscious literary work, however greatly he has reduced and jiggered it for the adaptation, Schreiber is eventually compelled to adopt a sobering, elegaically tragic mood in the movie’s last section. His movie can’t really accommodate the implications of the novel, and the mood changes aren’t really coherent. Trying to address Hitler’s Final Solution, and Ukrainian complicity in it, Schreiber gets stuck on a kind of melancholy sentimentality. His adaptation may have proceeded on a misreading of the novel, deliberate or not. His attempt to gain control of the book and its themes was probably ill-advised, but it was also brave in a perverse way.