In his first outing as writer-director, actor Schreiber (2004's The Manchurian Candidate) takes on Jonathan Safran Foer's crafty 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated. The story follows Jonathan (Wood) as he travels to Ukraine to find out more about his late grandfather. He hires Alex (Hutz) as his translator and Alex's grandfather (Leskin) as the driver. Also along for the ride is grandfather's "seeing-eye bitch," a dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.
Told in three voices (Jonathan, Alex and a historical flashback), the novel slips back and forth between viewpoints, and in this way effortlessly morphs from sidesplitting humor to heartbreaking tragedy.
Schreiber only has the one viewpoint—the movie screen—and his biggest hurdle is the character of Alex, who gets all the laughs in the novel with his unique English translations, coming up with phrases like "manufacturing Z's" instead of "sleeping." Alex must now also serve to translate the serious Holocaust stories that come in the film's second half (in Ukrainian) and must drop his hilarious translations to do so.
He is clearly aware of this hiccup and does an admirable job of smoothing it out. The film's quiet, exquisitely timed shots with their weird humor peg Schreiber as a Western counterpart to Aki Kaurismaki (The Man Without a Past). Mostly, the filmmaker targets his lens on the trio, rambling through the countryside, very often lost, in their tiny car, each turning over their preconceived notions of one another.
Schreiber establishes a bittersweet tone from the start that glues the tragic and comic together. Each character gets a moment to drop his guard, such as the vegetarian Jonathan dropping his lone baked potato from the dinner table or Alex being intimidated when asking directions from a group of roadside workers.
Hutz is perfect as Alex, but Wood has the truly difficult part. Schreiber has added new depth to the character and Wood carefully embodies it, using his hauntingly huge blue eyes to reflect the bittersweet inside the comedy followed by the sadness inside the tragedy.
Everything Is Illuminated also pauses to appreciate simple beauty, such as an amber-encased grasshopper or a field of sunflowers. The journey ends with an especially lovely, ragged calm. Everything, truly, has been illuminated.