The affection that Liev Schrieber, director and writer of “Everything Is Illuminated,” felt towards the novel is evident in the film’s spirit of joyful quirkiness. Where the original story was characterized by its quirky inventiveness, the film version relies on shortcuts and kitsch.
The film tells the story of Jonathan Safran Foer’s (named for the writer himself) journey to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Once there, he falls into the comically incapable hands of a Ukrainian touring company that specializes in taking Jews to find their dead relatives. Alex, whose broken and bizarre narration is taken straight from the book, acts as Jonathan’s translator who is simultaneously writing a book about their journey. Alex’s grandfather, a surly, mysterious old man who pretends to be blind, drives them around the back roads of the Ukrainian countryside in search of a town called Trachimbro, that doesn’t seem to exist.
Though it may seem unfair to hold the film alongside the book, the association is explicitly written into the film, which divides itself into chapters. But whereas the book leaps in and out of an imagined Eastern Europe through twenty chapters—which trap, in their wide embrace, a mix of magical realism, late 19th- early 20th-century Yiddish literature, autobiography, and folktale-fantasy—the film has only four relatively straightforward chapters. The excesses of Safran Foer’s book, which render it a sort of song-puzzle instead of just a novel, are cut out to form a bare bones travel narrative that occasionally dips into the past with a stylized flashback.
Though the novel revels in characters’ intricacies, the film favors quirkiness over psychological depth. For instance, we first meet Jonathan in a series of sequences that slap his endearing oddities onto the screen. The first shot features him as a wide-eyed, bespectacled kid in a suit and tie, standing black against a white background. As we enter his room, the camera pans to a wall plastered with pristine family portraits, as well as a host of finely labeled specimens enshrined in Zip Lock plastic bags, including photographs, yarmulkes, and his deceased grandmother’s false teeth.
Evidently, this is Jonathan’s form of a family tree. He attempts to retrace the meanderings of time, collect their detritus, and trap them in a plastic bag. The camera pans slowly over Jonathan’s bizarre collection, inviting us to delight in the strangeness of his mind. But this peek never yields a real understanding of the character—or, for that matter, of the problem of trying to (literally) preserve the past. The sequence seems to say, flashily, “Meet Jonathan, our protagonist, a deeply philosophical weirdo!” But the film stops there, and our hero’s internal life remains indiscernible. Furthermore, the deep question of the scene is never fully engaged. What happens when a person tries to revisit the sites of history? It seems that we are supposed to be satisfied that Jonathan’s depth is housed in his visually pleasing quirk.
The shot of the objects on the wall is a collection of clues that promises us a mystery, partially by appealing to a tendency to wax nostalgic and cling to the objects that define us. But the mystery is too easily resolved. In the end, everything is illuminated, and Jonathan returns safely home from his journey with a zip-lock bag full of dirt from Trachimbrod in tow. History, for Jonathan, can be packaged up and tacked on a wall, and then filmed for our viewing pleasure.
The film is ultimately a road trip film, wherein everyone comes back a bit more mature than they were when they started out. Such a turn would be fine if the film did not claim to grapple with making sense of the difficult, tragic history of Eastern Europe. In the end, Liev Schreiber should have relied more heavily on Safran Foer’s book. Whereas the film fetishizes the imagination and the past without rendering them, the book—because of its excesses, confusion, and meanderings—successfully presents the past in all of its shadowy, fantastic glory.
