Jonathon is a collector. Peering at the world through thick glasses, he ziplocs scraps of memory, accumulating a wall of labeled, dated paraphernalia from his family's life. In his austere black suit and tie, Jonathan (Elijah Wood) surveys his anthology of dust, dentures, postcards and photographs.
His withered grandmother gives him a black and white snapshot of a man and a woman in a field. The script on the back, "Safran and Augustina, 1940" becomes his passport to a mystery that leads him across the Atlantic Ocean and deep into a wounded family history.
Meanwhile Adidas-donning, chain-wearing, gold-toothed Alex (Eugene Hutz) swaggers through the streets of Ukraine. His family runs a guide service that "helps rich Jews searching for their dead families." At dinner one night, his father announces the advent of a writer looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
So when Jonathan arrives at the train station in Ukraine, welcomed by a brass fanfare's rendition of the "Star-Spangled Banner" and sees Alex's grandfather dozing in the driver's seat with thick, dark sunglasses and a snarling dog, he is a bit concerned.
"Don't worry," Alex assures him from the passenger side, "he only thinks that he is blind."
After tentatively crawling into the cramped back seat, Jonathon squirms beside Sammy Davis Jr., Jr., the "officious seeing-eye bitch." Alex, as the "humble translator," sits beside Grandfather, who drives in search of Trachimbrod, the elusive destination that no villagers have heard of and only the compass of faith, memory and mourning can locate.
Everything Is Illuminated, Liev Schreiber's luminous adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's book, is an elegiac dream laced with melancholy and tempered by the absurd. Narrated in five chapters, it captures fragmentary translations from Ukrainian to English, from secret to revelation, from generation to generation. Schreiber directs an eccentric odyssey of three people traveling from the spectacle of golden sunflowers, azure skies and emerald fields to the sepia horrors of the past. It is a stunning epiphany of the disappearance of a town, the legacy of the Holocaust and the harrowing trials of the Jewish faith.
With blinding poignancy, the film considers the consequences of tragedy. Through its surreal scenery and peculiar characters, it meditates on the inheritance of memory and how people comprehend the past. Jonathan seals sundry objects in plastic bags in an attempt to cling to his heritage. Alex struggles to deliver Jonathan the verbal artifacts of his family. Grandfather wanders in a field amongst rusted artillery and bold wildflowers, triggering a catastrophic trance of remembrance.
Everything Is Illuminated fruitfully marries a serious sadness with bizarre yet beautiful exchanges between humans -- a ghostly child who deflates the car tire, a roadside biker with angel wings, the skeletal laborers in the ditch. Alex's gnarled yet comic translation with its mangled nouns ("repose" means sleep) and contorted adjectives ("proximal" means close) delineates the difficulty of communication.
The film deserves the patience it demands to witness what Alex calls Jonathan's "rigid search" for understanding. The past and present blur in a kaleidoscope of mysterious memory that both hypnotizes and disorients the viewer. Like Jonathan, Alex and Grandfather, we must wait in patience and sadness for the truth, for everything to be illuminated.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
