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Everything Is Illuminated |
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 Release Date: 09/23/05 (Future Release)
Starring: Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin
Director: Liev Schreiber
Rating: (PG-13) |
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Genre |
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Drama, Comedy |
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Running Time |
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100 min |
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Distributor |
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Warner Independent Pictures |
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 Official Website |
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NEW YORK REVIEW
To adopt for a moment the dialect of Alexi—the mad Ukrainian tour guide who narrates Jonathan Safran Foer’s wonderful novel Everything Is Illuminated in mangled malapropism—I am effervescent about this movie. It is very unordinary. Actor Liev Schreiber could scarcely have picked a more difficult adaptation for his debut as a screenwriter and director, but the risk pays off. Foer’s tale of a young man chasing down his family’s Holocaust legacy oscillated wildly from rhapsody to dirge, from teary confession to magic fantasy and sniggering sex-joke slapstick. Schreiber’s stylish indie adaptation is necessarily a simpler thing: less funny, less ambitious, but still undeniably moving, hewing as it does to the novel’s central virtue, its astounding empathy. With brilliant cinematography by Matthew Libatique and sustained performances from the two leads—Elijah Wood, marvelously still as the nebbish Foer, and Gogol Bordello front man Eugene Hutz, gloriously itchy as Alexi—the film may be inconsistent and odd, but it, like the novel, slowly earns your trust. At the end, when Foer finally discovers his grandparents’ sad history, Hutz and Wood just stand staring at one another, dumbfounded. In another film, the moment might have felt maudlin, but Schreiber manages to maintain a simpler, more effective emotional tone: quiet, confused, and awestruck. — Reviewed by Logan Hill, New York Magazine
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