Everything is Illuminated ****

I loved this movie. The trailers and marketing for this film hardly do it justice. The basic premise is simple, a young American Jew, Jonathan Safran Foer (played by Elijah Wood), travels to the Ukraine to discover the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. But above everything else, this film is a journey.

The film starts off light-heartedly with a great deal of comedy, mainly driven by the outstanding performance of Eugene Hutz as Alex. Elijah Wood's character is a strange little obsessive compulsive guy who we are shown "collects" things. There is a great deal of humor from the initial culture clash of these two character's worlds colliding, but that drops sharply in the middle of the film and the movie suddenly takes on a much more serious tone after the grandfather (Boris Leskin) has a particularly violent outburst. It is after this point that the film begins to take on it's gravitas.

The issue of anti-semitism is dealt with throughout the film, as this mismatched crew searches for a town that was obliterated during World War II. As so many movies, the real journey is not so much the physical one, but that of the characters finding themselves. It is in this journey that secrets and regrets are revealed and in the end, everything is illuminated.

This marks the directorial debut of actor Liev Schreiber, and while I thought it was great, I'm still left wondering how much better it could have been in more experienced hands. There seemed to be a somewhat plodding pace in the beginning and a lot of shots that really weren't relevant in showing us either the place or the story. That being said, it is still a very impressive first film. I thought Elijah Wood was great, if not too wooden. At times it was almost as if he held back in an effort not to look like that other character he played, the hairy footed hobbity one. The grandfather turned in a solid performance as well, but the real standout was Eugene Hurtz who managed to have both humor and grace in even the most dramatic moments.