Everything is Illuminated & Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan's guide, and the narrator of the film, is his Eastern funhouse-mirror-image, a young man from Odessa named (or, as he would say, 'dubbed') Alex. One picture, of the young Safran with a woman named Augustine, sends Jonathan to Ukraine in search of the village where his grandfather lived. A wall of Jonathan's room is devoted to old family photographs and small, everyday objects sealed in plastic bags, functioning both as keepsakes and as clues to the past. He is especially fascinated with his grandfather and namesake, Safran Foer, who died when Jonathan was a boy and who had escaped from the Nazis as a young man. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.Įlijah Wood, his pale eyes magnified by Coke-bottle glasses, plays a young American writer named Jonathan Safran Foer, who is obsessed with his family history.

Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber, plucking a single thread of the novel's interwoven narratives, shows himself to be a sincere and serious reader, but his effort at translation does not quite work. Foer's verbal and imaginative energies brought him close to succeeding. This is a difficult feat to attempt in the best of circumstances, as well as, perhaps, an unseemly one. Taking place in Ukraine (though filmed mainly in the Czech Republic), 'Everything is Illuminated' is a gentle comedy of understanding and forgiveness played in the shadow of the Holocaust. The film, more emphatically than the book but in keeping with its spirit, suggests that even the darkest page of history can be bathed in a glow of consoling, self-congratulatory sentiment. A less charitable interpretation is also possible. The title of Liev Schreiber's 'Everything Is Illuminated,' adapted from the best-selling novel of the same title by Jonathan Safran Foer, refers to the way the past casts a glow of understanding onto the present.

Everything is Illuminated & Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer