Everything is illuminated (2005)

Last weekend, I gave Tysons's new movie theater a try and watched Everything is illuminated: a Warner Independent Pictures production starred by Elijah Wood, directed and written by Liev Schreiber, and based on Jonathan Safran Foer's 2002 bestselling debut novel.

When the movie opens, Jonathan (Wood) is at the side of his dying grandmother. She gives him an old photograph, taken a half century ago in the Ukraine. The man in the photo is his grandfather; the woman is unknown. Jonathan, a 20-year-old American Jew, begins a search to track down the woman who he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

Jonathan is guided in his search by a family specializing in helping "rich Jews searching for their dead families". Narrated by the street-wise Alex (Eugene Hutz), a Ukrainian representing the post-Soviet youthful exuberance, the film unfolds in chapters and is structured as a road movie where every stop provides cultural insight and emotional introspection.

Schreiber’s landscape supporting the journey and his chosen images -- a graveyard of old war machines, a field of sunflowers, etc -- are admirable. Nevertheless, a non-emotional protagonist, the blurry logic of some key passages in the film’s denouement, and a few American-Ukrainian culture clash clichés do not help to lift this story beyond summer flick status.

Jonathan – compulsively afraid of forgetting -- collects bits and pieces of his family’s past and packs them in Ziploc bags, carefully labeled. This motif gestures toward many great themes: the elusiveness of memory, the importance of small details in life, or even the ineffable value of symbols in connecting ourselves to the past; but instead of mastering such feelings, Everything is illuminated abstracts these topics and simplifies them too much.

Should you go and watch this film? If I were you, I will definitely wait for the DVD and choose another film for your first visit to the new theaters across the street: they rock!