Cinematador
They used to show films like this in art houses, which became retail space for drugstores.The tone, story, and camera work is impeccable. Details like the faded boxes and impossible sunflowers remain with us forever. The amber necklace becomes the collection, the story, the film, but only after.Due to translation or what remains unspoken, much of the conversation hangs unfinished in the air, or done with eye contact-even from Sammy Davis. Every character carries out a critical part of the story, with minimal dialogue. Each time the day dawns, the story moves forward.As with the Jarmusch movie Paterson, this film is like a poem about the source material. Rather than simply trying to replicate the book, the movie pays homage by creating its own rich space and mood.
eric262003
During the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, Elijah Wood was the performer that everyone watched old and young alike. In 2005, Wood had two movies that exhibited his charismatic appeal. His expression have always been louder than his words and he proves it through all his performances. The first one being "Green Street Holligans", Wood focuses the attention of how vicious soccer fans can be, especially in Great Britain. Here in "Everything is Illuminated", he visits Ukraine who may have been emancipated from Soviet rule, but the damage from the second World War still lingers on.Wood plays the role of Jonathan, an eccentric young gentleman who seems to be mysteriously immaculately dressed, clad in suits and dons big Coke-bottle glasses and has a unorthodox way of collecting things he's experienced in life. Stuff like rock or dirt from the places he's visited or jewelry that traces back to his family's past. The opening scene features his dying grandmother where she hands him an old photo taken a long time ago in Ukraine. The man in the picture is his grandfather, but the woman in the photograph is a mystery.Because Jonathan's hobby is looking into the past, he journey to Ukraine to search for this mystery woman. Jonathan recruits a Michael Jackson fan and a self-proclaimed chick magnet named Alex (Eugene Hutz), his grandfather (Boris Leskin) who fakes his blindness even though he's the driver of a car and a crazy seeing eye dog.Based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and directed by Liev Schreiber "Everything is Illuminated" has everything it has for a screwball comedy in which almost all the characters are a bit kooky. Some of the scenes featured can be quite surreal at times. Like for instance Jonathan is a vegetarian and yet he's situated in place where everyone of it's residence eats and consumes meat. They enter a diner and the owner refuses to serve him a potato unless he has it with a side of meat.Just when you think the film was losing its spark, it starts to become more serious than one could imagine. It becomes obvious that the village where Jonathan's grandfather grew up in has become expunged. The mystery reveals that Jonathan's grandfather once lived in a small Jewish town that was vanished off the face of the Earth by the Nazi's during World War II and has become unmentioned by the present-day Ukranians.I usually have my doubts about actors/actresses directing for the first time, but here I think Schreiber actually did a very good job here. The imagery and the settings really set the tone quite subliminally here. From the grave of classic war apparatuses to a field of gorgeous sunflowers, this movie demonstrates that no matter where we live and who we are, there will always be a connection.
Danusha_Goska Save Send Delete
"Everything is Illuminated" is an embarrassingly bad stinker on almost every count, with two exceptions: Eugene Hutz is weirdly, wildly charismatic as Alex, a goofy young Ukrainian who imagines himself a hip-hop star. And "Everything Is Illuminated"'s score is excellent, consisting, as it does, of authentic Eastern European folk music.The first half of "Everything Is Illuminated" consists of g-rated versions of "Borat" jokes. Ukrainians are funny because they try to be cool like Americans. Ukrainians are laughable because they speak English in a simple-minded pidgin, calling "African Americans" "Negroes," for example, and saying "repose" for "sleep." Ukrainians are funny because of their sex lives. Ukrainians are also dirty, irrationally and by nature violent, they hate Jews, they wear unattractive clothing; the men are ready to beat up any newcomer to their town naïve enough to ask for driving directions; the women are either cowed housewives married to husbands and fathers who lead with their fists, or slatternly, sullen, obese waitresses; goat-herding Ukrainian children engage in mindless vandalism like flattening car tires. These folks are so debased that even their dogs are ugly, stupid, and vicious. Yup, there's even a creepy household pet. Of course these comically stupid, ugly, crude yokels are responsible for the Holocaust. At one point, Elijah Wood, as Jonathan Safran Foer, insists that the Ukraine was as bad as Nazi Germany.This nasty stereotype is not the invention of Liev Schreiber, the director and script writer. Schreiber and Safran Foer, the author of the book on which the film is based, are merely exploiting, not inventing, hateful ethnic stereotypes. The image of the brutal Eastern European peasant has been around for centuries. Americans are most familiar with this stereotype from Polak jokes and the film "Borat." Eugene Hutz is genuinely funny in his thankless, Eastern European "Amos-and-Andy"-style role. He acts the Ukrainian dunce with as much grace and dignity as possible, and is the only thing worth watching in the film. Some scenes are laugh out loud funny, especially when Wood lectures Hutz on the use of the term "African American." But "Amos and Andy" was funny, too.After about an hour of Bohunk jokes, "Everything Is Illuminated" abruptly turns off the comedy tap and turns into a turgid, static Holocaust film. What little action there was in the film, provided by Hutz's kinetic mugging, shuffling, and jiving, or by Ukrainians punching other Ukrainians, stops. Characters stand still and offer speeches about horrible things that happened in the past. Jonathan and Alex arrive at the one pleasant house, with the one dignified resident, in all of Ukraine. The colorful cottage is out of a Disney fairy tale. Clean laundry snaps on the line. Orderly rows of sunflowers surround the home. The peasant woman living in the cottage is gracious and lovely. Aha. She's not really Ukrainian. She's Jewish.On the other hand, Elijah Wood, as Jonathan Safran Foer, a modern American Jew, comes off no better than the stereotyped Ukrainians. He, too, is a stereotype: the uptight, obsessional, neurotic, socially backward, weak, frightened, passive Jew. Wood, as Jonathan, is so stiff he could be playing a corpse. A writer and director should have a very sound aesthetic reason for making the Jewish character in a film about the Holocaust a passive Jew. Scheiber has no good reason. He's just playing two stereotypes against each other, insisting that one needn't learn anything from one of the most horrendous crimes in history in order to make a film about it. Given that there is a very self-destructive death of another Jewish character in the movie, Wood's passivity is even more troubling.The Holocaust is never honored by "Everything Is Illuminated." In the unlikely event that this is the only Holocaust film the viewer ever sees, that viewer would have no idea what the Holocaust was. As slow, pretentious, and ponderous as this film is, it never for one moment manages to convey the monumental horror and heartbreak of the Holocaust.Again, I'd love to see Eugene Hutz in just about any new film; meanwhile, I've been watching youtube videos of his band, "Gogol Bordello." Hutz sings and dances like a man who has vowed to live fast, play hard, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.
