An old photograph. A grasshopper suspended in amber. A Star of David on an open linked chain. Three objects that propel a phobic, compulsive New York Jew (Elijah Wood) toward the place where a woman named Augustine saved his grandfather's life. Everything Is Illuminated--a movie about language, time and place, and, above all, memory--is Liev Schrieber's debut film, as both writer and director. It is one of those exquisitely orchestrated films, with painterly precision in photographic composition and performances that are not so much acted but scored, like notes of music adhering to a time signature. It is the sort of extreme carefulness that makes a movie seem loved into existence rather than simply filmed.
The protagonist, Jonathan, is met by two, or rather three, of the most unlikely tour guides for his ancestral trek to Eastern Europe: a hip-hop Ukranian (Eugene Hutz) whose English is not quite "premium,"--"My legal name is Alexander Perchov, but all of my friends dub me Alex, because this is much more flaccid to utter"; Alex's anti-Semitic grandfather (Boris Leskin) who, though he is the driver on the tour, claims to be blind; and the blind old man's "seeing-eye bitch," a deranged border collie named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.
As this strange stew-like melange struggle to communicate the words "not possible" emerge more than once, and it seems a good description; the possibility of connection between the band of four is ludicrous to contemplate, with canyon sized divides of culture, generation, language, and experience (and in the case of Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. species) keeping the characters apart, even in the tiny, broken-down, old car they use for their journey. As you may have guessed, Schreiber sees that union happens, and it does so, both palpably and mystically over...a white boiled potato.
Alex's inapproximate translations are a device Schrieber drew directly form the novel that inspired the script. Words pop through the dialogue, curious and odd, in their paradoxical inexactitude and precision of expression: a grandfather and grandson are not "close" they are "proximal," things are not "good" or "the best," they are "premium," their hero's quest is described as a "rigid search," and one does not go to sleep but "reposes." It brings the usual prose of movies to the compressed and heightened level of poetry. Schreiber collaborates with the original author (Jonathan Safran Foer) in his choice of images, which take on a similar heightened realism. They are ordinary objects: haloed, naked light bulbs, narrow beds, a pair of glasses, a bottle of hand cream. Jonathan is compelled to collect these objects; he is A Collector more than A Writer. Unlike the semi-autobiographical Jonathan of the novel, he doesn't write books as much as he catalogues--an intriguing departure which Schreiber selects with signature carefulness and reverence. It is a departure that represents the best an adaptor can do in choosing to alter; a slight turn to the left or the right of what was in the original, but one that ends up driving the story told to the destination quicker, and leaving us with a curious sense that the adaptor has not changed the author's intent so much as clarified it. It is true, the adaptor always inserts himself when he makes such selections but Schreiber seems very deliberate about it, rather than pretending he is absent. As Jonathan our Collector and Cataloguer precisely picks up objects, sealing them hermetically in the American convenience of zip-lock bags, Schreiber presents himself to us as another Careful Collector, collecting objects for us with the camera; ordinary objects that are endowed, burdened even: with hope, anger, confusion, and loss, mixed in all the ordinariness. For what is more ordinary than loss? It is, perhaps, the most ordinary and ordinal of human experiences.
If Schreiber can be accused of anything in this film it would be sentimentality. Inevitability drives the story, as the various plot lines are drawn together, ironically for Wood, by a single ring imbued with mystic power. Despite the driving narrative codes, Schrieber flirts with indulgence, as he tends to dwell where others may have just touched and left. However, for me, the pay off make this not only forgivable but necessary. The deliberate slowing of the pace makes watching like listening to the long and meandering story of a family elder; it tries your patience, but you persist out of affection and respect. And in the end you are richer for it, as your patience is repaid, as patience is almost always repaid: for the patient, meaning and connection both are illuminated. We forget that patience is not a virtue of self-sacrifice for its own sake, it ensures that we don't miss life in our desire to hurry through it, that our fear of struggle and pain don't turn us into the disconnected living dead.
And speaking of elders and the past, the message of this piece of whimsy and melancholy quietly reveals itself as an authentic Jewish mysticism in disguise. It delivers the ancient message that continually needs resurrecting, particularly in an age that idolizes progress: envisioning our past as behind us, forgotten, and gone is an illusion, a lie in the dark that disintegrates once the light is turned on. It is in this piece of Kabbalistic that a shirt turned "inside out" suddenly becomes the whole film entire, a fractal. Within the shirt that is inside out is the coded message of memory, a cipher decrypted for us in Alex's broken English voice over as Jonathan returns home:
I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine.
Despite the heady mystic philosophy that is undeniably present, the movie has moments of giddy hilarity, punctuating the sentiment of the film and providing release as well as underscore. I hope Schreiber's first attempt at writing and directing won't be his last--but it is possible. I find it hard to believe that he could find a story and a subject matter he could love quite as thoroughly.
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