Everything is Illuminated

Less adaptation than miniaturization, Liev Schreiber's film of Jonathan Safran Foer's extravagant novel serves up an intimate tale of an American Jew's journey into his family's history, told with a rather heavy-handed surrealistic sensibility. Elijah Wood—clothed in a black suit, wearing huge glasses accentuating the size of his eyes, and for the most part emotionally impassive—plays an avid collector of family memorabilia who travels to the Ukraine to investigate a woman pictured with his grandfather in an old photo. He's driven around the country by a voluble translator and the man's irascible grandpa, and after a series of adventures—some humorously deadpan and others bleakly tense—the trio locate the site in the photo, and in a sequence mixing near-hallucinatory imagery and dreamlike atmosphere with rather earthbound revelations, all three learn painful lessons about the past. While one can appreciate what Schreiber is reaching for—an off-kilter yet resonant depiction of the bittersweet nature of recovering a piece of family history that is both uplifting and tragic—the first-time director's transitions are often jarring, and the picture feels more like a succession of disconnected episodes than a coherent whole. Everything is Illuminated wants to reveal the painful legacy of the Holocaust, but the light it sheds on the subject is at best flickering. Optional. [Note: DVD extras include 19 minutes of additional scenes, and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a disappointing film.] (F. Swietek)