Guy Walks into a Shtetl

By Richard Schickel

Jonathan (Elijah Wood) is a collector with a limited range and a deep, if enigmatically motivated, passion. What he saves is family memorabilia--his grandma's false teeth, a dollar bill, even dirt from ground that is somehow hallowed in family memory. All this stuff he seals in plastic Baggies and pins to a wall in his room. One of his most prized possessions is a photograph of his grandfather with a Ukrainian woman who, according to family legend, saved his life during World War II. In Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan journeys to the Ukraine to discover her fate.

In its early--and best--passages, writer- director Liev Schreiber's film, adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, is more comically daring than such a tale has any right to be. Jonathan--always dressed in a dark suit and tie, peering at the world through thick glasses and expecting to find vegetarian cuisine in the depths of a country where sausage appears to be the national dish--is not entirely prepared for the ministrations of his tour guides. They operate a grandly named organization called Heritage Tours, which consists of a dubious car and eccentric employees: Alex (Eugene Hutz), who says he enjoys writing but really wants to be an accountant; and Alex's grandfather (Boris Leskin), the driver, who claims to be blind and to require the services of "a seeing eye b____" named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Alex is one of those young Europeans who dream the American dream but whose actual knowledge of the country consists of half-baked and out-of-date pop-cultural references. The grandfather is full of mysterious anger. The dog is just nuts but salvageable.

What they're searching for is the shtetl from which Jonathan's grandfather escaped, and it becomes increasingly clear that it was wiped out a half-century earlier by the Nazis. They find, at last, one survivor, Lista (Laryssa Lauret), who is also a collector but on a grander scale than Jonathan can imagine. Her aim is to keep alive the memory of the entire wiped-out village by hoarding its detritus. There is, as it turns out, one other survivor, whose identity should probably not be revealed here. Alas, the tragic dimensions of Everything Is Illuminated do not quite reach the originality and intensity of its comic passages. There is something conventional, not quite emotionally realized, in its evocation of the Holocaust. Perhaps the first thing people said about the Holocaust--that its horrors were beyond the range of art to fully comprehend--may be the truest.

On the other hand, Schreiber's film represents a bold attempt to integrate the themes of increasingly lost memories and the forgetful, distracted modern mind. That means the obsessive Jonathan has a more important historical role to play than he perhaps imagines. It also means that this often vivid movie, though it doesn't quite attain its highest intentions, is well worth seeing. And thinking about. --By Richard Schickel