Movie Review: Everything Is Illuminated

I confess, I haven't read the book.

This is fairly odd, as I've been making an effort to read the current Best New Novels from Promising Bright Young Things more or less since I graduated from college, and Jonathan Safran Foer's book was a clear holder of that status, having garnered glowing reviews not only from official Arbiters of Culture, but also from some of my most trusted friends. However, the furor happened after I'd read an excerpt in the New Yorker's New Fiction issue, and for some reason said excerpt had bugged me. I got it, I appreciated why people would dig it, but I felt like he was trying too hard to beat us all over the head with linguistic brilliance.

This is a large part of why I went to see the movie with almost no expectations, other than that it would probably be a nicely-made indie film.

I DID have an expectation that Eugene Hutz, who plays Alex, the malapropistic Ukrainian tour guide- cum- translator- cum- narrator of the film, would be portraying a character something like that of his stage persona as the lead singer of Gogol Bordello. Gogol Bordello is probably one of my three favorite live acts of all time, though you would have to pay me a decent amount of money to listen to more than one of their recorded albums in a row. The best way I can describe them is that they're like an Eastern European version of the Pogues, but with a more carnivalesque stage show. Film buffs might get a better sense of things if I say a Gogol Bordello show is like being sucked into the party scene in a Kusterica film. Whatever your pop culture analogy, I have never been in a situation where a gathering of people more instantly turned into a big happy party, with the possible exception of Wesleyan University's Spring Fling 1994, when P-Funk took the stage- but that was already a party (just ask the band member in the wedding dress who'd been doing keg stands on the hill). Hutz himself is an insanely (both literally and figuratively) charismatic presence, the kind of guy you feel like you wouldn't ever want to DATE, but would be psyched to spend a night on the town in the company of, just to see where you ended up... as long as you didn't have to do anything the next day but sleep off the vodka coma. Hutz's stage presence and his NYC rep as a DJ made me expect that his portrayal of Alex would be similarly over-the-top, the performative equivalent of the book's verbal pyrotechnics, and thus a tad on the wearisome if not annoying side.

I could not have been more wrong.

Hutz is almost unrecognizable in the movie, appearing not only a good decade younger than his actual age (30ish), but also displaying a befuddledly introspective essential sweetness of character that is only shakily concealed by post-Communist hip-hop-loving bravado. It's a phenomenal performance, one that I would have assumed was more or less "found art" had I never seen the man in another context. I suspect that Hutz will not receive the recognition he deserves, because much of the character's deepest emotions are intentionally underplayed, but if there were any justice in the world, he would be nominated for at least a SAG award, if not an Oscar.

The movie itself begins in a familiar-feeling wacky foreign picaresque vein, featuring Elijah Wood as "Jonathan Safran Foer," a young Jewish New Yorker who is coming to the Ukraine in search of his family's past. He is clearly drawn as an eccentric, and is accepted by his family as a "collector" who stores mementos of his and their lives in plastic bags and tacks them to a wall. His appearance underscores this eccentricity, as he dresses in a neat black suit, slicks back his hair, and wears enormous glasses through which his eyes are magnified nearly to the point of monstrosity. This affectation, which seems intitially merely to signal a certain sort of mid-90's indie film sensibility, ends up telegraphing something deeper when it is finally stripped away toward the end of the film.

In fact, most of what at first seems overly familiar and perhaps a bit precious in the first half of the movie ends up providing a stronger emotional resonance when the story comes to a close. What seems like aimless meandering, both within the journey the characters are taking and in the delineation of the characters themselves, turns out to be a specific set of signposts on a map that we viewers are only able to read once we've seen the final destination. From the characters themselves to the journey they take to the implications what they find and even the very landscapes through which they move, the film starts off wackily prosaic and finds its way toward the beautiful and/or profound.

I don't want to say too much about the film, because I think it's better for having been seen without expectation. I also don't want to oversell it... it's not the Greatest Movie I've Ever Seen, it's just a well-told story that develops more interestingly and provocatively than I expected it to, and ends up being ultimately more moving than it initially seems it will have any right to. I was enormously and pleasantly surprised by how moving and interesting I found the second half of this movie, and have been left with enough questions that I now think I have to read the book. Damn it.