Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
Schrieber Illuminates Foer’s Manuscript
by Lilit Marcus
Many of the other people with whom I discussed Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated were clearly in one camp or another, preferring either the present or past tense story. It’s pretty clear the allegiance of Illuminated’s director/screenplay adapter, Liev Schrieber. The Trachimbrod part of the novel, a whirl of magic realism (and, yes, the part I liked better), is gone. Instead the storyline focuses on the other, meta, story: A young man named Jonathan Safran Foer going to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. What remains, though, is promising.
Casting Elijah Wood as Foer was an inspired move by Schreiber, as Wood manages to be quirky without being cloying — something that his literary counterpart didn’t always manage to do. Wood wears oversized glasses that make him look like an alien. Next to him is Alex, his Russian guide/translator. Alex is tall where Jonathan is short, flamboyant where he is mousy, obsessed with the future instead of the past. Much of the book’s dynamic, which the film retains, is the disconnect between Jonathan and Alex as two halves of the same whole. Of course, they find that they have more in common than they realize. Eugene Hutz (frontman for JDub Records-backed Gogol Bordello), as Foer’s antagonist, is hilarious. He manages to transcend the sometimes-cliché, not to mention the Russian accent.
In the meantime, there’s a series of wacky secondary characters to deal with, including Alex’s grandfather (and Jonathan’s driver), an anti-Semite who pretends to be blind, and a cute dog named Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr. Ironically, many gags that wore thin in the book translate better to the screen. Foer as a writer often throws in “quirky” characters who do strange things for no apparent reason. Here, Schreiber will cut to a shot of Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr. doing something cute whenever he needs a break in a scene, an idea which fell flat in prose.
Too many jokes depend on cultural differences, such as the scene where Jonathan tells Alex that he is a vegetarian. Alex, disbelieving, keeps listing kinds of meat, only to be told again and again that Jonathan doesn’t eat them. It’s a conversation lifted almost verbatim from My Big Fat Greek Wedding or any other culture-clash movie from the last ten years. Too often, humor is supposed to come from Alex’s amusing malapropisms or Jonathan’s misunderstanding of Ukrainian culture. Jonathan’s neuroses are also gimmicky, such as his obsession with collecting tchotchkes from wherever he goes (even a piece of potato).
The movie is being billed as a fish-out-of-water story, and it’s somewhat fair. Jonathan, a nebbish Ivy leaguer, is nowhere near the pop star or nightclub DJ who Alex clearly would have preferred as an American visitor. It’s also a road-trip movie, as the characters drive around the country in a sort of picaresque. It’s also a buddy comedy, Jonathan and Alex the foils. Even without Trachimbrod and the stories of all its residents, the film still comes off as cluttered, the movie version of an overachieving Jewish kid who just can’t settle down and only pick one major.
Visit the film’s official website here. Also check out Atlanta Jewish Life’s interview with director Liev Schrieber here.
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