Illuminating Cinema

Commencing a Rigid Search -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Let me preface this blog, as I did recently, by saying that I’m behind on my blog-writing. My stepfather passed away from a very aggressive brain cancer last month, so we had to deal with funeral details and all the sadness of that. Now I’m dealing with associated ‘family issues’ of relatives who’ve presumed to move in (already) with my recently bereaved Mother. Family is such fun. But enough of my personal travails… on with the blog!

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Jonathan Foer is the extremely gifted, young novelist who penned the novel, Everything is Illuminated. He took a creative writing class from Joyce Carol Oates, who told Jonathan that he has the gift of energy. That he does, because the 2006 movie based on his novel is full of comic charm and energy. Illuminated is a fictional story, loosely based on the novelist himself -- the title character has the same name, Jonathan, and is played to obsessive-compulsive, deadpan perfection by Elijah Wood. Jonathan is a young Jewish American writer on a quest in the Ukraine -- a quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather from Nazi annihilation in WWII. He hires the elderly, anti-Semitic Ukrainian Alex and his young adult grandson, also named Alex to take him to the village Trachimbrod where the atrocities took place. The younger Alex serves as the English translator, hilariously so -- with his fractured and misapplied idioms.

They travel through the scenic countryside in a tiny blue East German Trabant station wagon. They’re accompanied by the boarder collie (and “seeing eye bitch”) Sammy Davis Junior. The elder Alex is a Sammy Davis Junior fan and the young Alex is a break dancing, womanizing Michael Jackson fan. (He is frequently “carnal” with the ladies). The young Alex reminds me a little bit of the “Wild and Crazy Guys” done by Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd on SNL, albeit with more color and dimension than the SNL actors.

The movie takes a sad, weird, quizzical change in tone when they finally reach Trachinbrod. The village is now simply a farmhouse surrounded by sunflowers -- it was essentially wiped out by the Nazis. The elderly woman living in the house is the last survivor and conveys some vital information (and corrections) to Jonathan’s understanding of things… His grandfather was never rescued, he’d already debarked to America. (Spoiler Alert) … The elder Alex recognizes the old woman as one who saw him crawl out of a pile of dead bodies. He is in truth a Jew (in denial of his Judaism) who was only wounded and then feigned death. He lived out his remaining life pretending to be Christian, long after the war.

The movie has a shocking (and not quite logical) ending where the elder Alex commits suicide by slitting his wrists in a bathtub. Apparently he has too much internal strife over his denial of his birth identity. Illuminated also uses extreme literary license to have such a coincidence -- that the man Jonathan hires as his driver happens to be complicit in what happened those many years ago in that remote village of 1,000 people. Movies frequently have such plot gimmicks, although if you’re willing to play along you might get a good cinematic payload. Everything is Illuminated is one of those movies -- the Ukrainian (actually Czech) countryside, the music and cinematography, and the gentle cultural interplay between genial Alex and uptight Jonathan make for an enriching experience.

Elijah Wood received top billing in this movie and he was very good. East European Eugene Hutz plays young Alex -- the jocular translator and tour guide. His compassion, humanity, energy and good spirits really carry the movie to its height. No matter the order of the billing, Everything is Illuminated is an excellent movie -- rent it now or see it on Apple TV’s summer selections like I did.

© 2009 blogSpotter