GetOut Magazine

Even the Holocaust rings hollow in ‘Illuminated’
By CRAIG OUTHIER
Get Out

In attempting to turn Jonathan Safran Foer's semi-autobiographical novel “Everything Is Illuminated” into coherent cinema, Liev Schreiber has done, if not the impossible, then the highly improbable: Reduced the Holocaust to a mere happening — an emotionless vessel of quirky musings and fashionably digressive storytelling.

“Lord of the Rings” star Elijah Wood plays Foer, a third-party character in his own story, self-depicted as a compulsive amateur archivist who collects family mementos, seals them in baggies and pins them to the wall of his home.

Hungry for information about his now-deceased Jewish grandparents, Jonathan packs up his various phobias and flies to the Ukraine, where he hires a young tour operator named Alex (Slavic punk-rocker Eugene Hutz, in a polished film debut) and his crabby, possibly anti-Semitic grandfather (Boris Leskin) to help him find the woman who helped Foer's own grandfather escape the Nazis. A trip across the countryside ensues,
followed by the promised illumination.

In the interim, Schreiber — the “Manchurian Candidate” actor, here making his debut as screenwriter and director — fashions crude entertainment from chillingly standard sources.

Alex's mangled, misapplied English (to Jonathan: “You were very proximal to your grandfather, yes?”) isn't the divine torture that it was in the book. If anything, Hutz — who also narrates the movie — appears to be channeling the “wild and crazy guys” of Dan Aykroyd's “Saturday Night Live” heyday.

Schreiber also places a bulky comedic load on Alex's yippy mutt (“Down and Out in Beverly Hills” suddenly comes to mind. . . . I don't know why) and devotes a preposterously unfunny segment to Foer's travails as a strict vegetarian.

Maybe the worst joke in “Everything Is Illuminated” is Foer himself. Stiff, eccentric, clad in a severe black undertaker's suit that he sometimes wears to bed (Schreiber uses black and white as a recurring visual motif, not ineffectively), Foer is a nightmare to look upon.

We don't know his motivations, we don't sense his anguish (or indifference?), and in the absence of these necessary containments, even the enormity of the Holocaust rings hollow into space.

'Everything Is Illuminated'
Starring: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin
Rating: PG-13 (disturbing images/violence, sexual content and profanity)
Running time: 106 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday at Harkins Camelview in Scottsdale
Playing: D+