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Everything Is Illuminated (2005)

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From Time Out London

If you didn’t know that ‘Scream’ co-star Liev Schreiber’s feature debut as writer-director was a literary adaptation, it wouldn’t be hard to guess. The whimsical chapter headings and portentously emphatic voiceover certainly preserve the flavour of Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed novel about his grandfather’s home village in the Ukraine and his own journey to retrace a community subsequently obliterated by the Nazis. But on screen, this sobering confrontation with history contrasts uneasily with the laboured culture-clash comedy which precedes it, as Kangol-clad wannabe-hipster tour guide Alex (Eugene Hutz) enthusiastically mangles the English language while acceding to the whims of ‘Johnfen’, a nervy Elijah Wood as the author manqué researching his roots.

Alex’s crusty grandpa, who claims blindness but still drives the puttering Trabant through rolling countryside, and his so-called ‘officious seeing-eye bitch’, a guide dog named Sammy Davis Junior Jr, might even be semi-amusing for a moment were it not for Schreiber’s incessant over-use of jaunty klezmer music to signal how funny everything is. The effect’s almost as wearing as Kusturica at his most indulgent, and certainly doesn’t put us in a receptive mood for the serious revelations to come. True, it’s hard to remain totally unmoved by the film’s sincere insistence on the primacy of memory and origins, but it might have generated even more emotional intensity were the inexperienced direction not so reliant on full-on close-ups aiming for intimate significance yet merely exposing the lack of dramatic tension.

An intriguing choice for the post-Tolkien Wood, though Schreiber’s putting him behind huge goggle-eyed specs precludes much chance of a performance – an inexplicably unilluminating move from an actor turned filmmaker.

Author: TJ

Time Out London Issue 1840: November 23-30 2005

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