Everything Is Illuminated (2005), written and directed by Liev Schreiber, begins as a comedy but ends as something very different.
Jonathan Foer (Elijah Wood) is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who is said to have saved his grandfather's life during WW II.
Jonathan travels to a rural region with his interpreter Alex (Eugene Hutz) and Alex's grandfather (Boris Leskin) as their driver.
The movie starts in a predictable way-- Wood does his Tobey Maguire imitation as a young American tourist overwhelmed by the Ukrainian language and customs.
Hutz is brilliant as the young man who mangles the English language, and is caught between the American's naivety and the grandfather's traditional ways.
I assumed the film would continue on in this vein, and would end with the two young men eventually respecting each other and finally forming a bond of friendship.
For better or worse, this is not what happens in this movie. Instead, what we get is a serious Holocaust story, which involves Jonathan's grandfather and (apparently) Alex's grandfather as well.
There was certainly a disconnect between the two halves of the movie. I was both surprised and confused by the film's second half. We left the theater uncertain about just who had done what to whom, and why.
Still, I think Everything is Illluminated is worth seeing to get another reminder of the millions of individual tragedies that, in the aggregate, made up the ultimate tragedy of the fate of the Jews of Eastern Europe in WW II. Just don't go expecting a comedy.
Jonathan Foer (Elijah Wood) is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to find the woman who is said to have saved his grandfather's life during WW II.
Jonathan travels to a rural region with his interpreter Alex (Eugene Hutz) and Alex's grandfather (Boris Leskin) as their driver.
The movie starts in a predictable way-- Wood does his Tobey Maguire imitation as a young American tourist overwhelmed by the Ukrainian language and customs.
Hutz is brilliant as the young man who mangles the English language, and is caught between the American's naivety and the grandfather's traditional ways.
I assumed the film would continue on in this vein, and would end with the two young men eventually respecting each other and finally forming a bond of friendship.
For better or worse, this is not what happens in this movie. Instead, what we get is a serious Holocaust story, which involves Jonathan's grandfather and (apparently) Alex's grandfather as well.
There was certainly a disconnect between the two halves of the movie. I was both surprised and confused by the film's second half. We left the theater uncertain about just who had done what to whom, and why.
Still, I think Everything is Illluminated is worth seeing to get another reminder of the millions of individual tragedies that, in the aggregate, made up the ultimate tragedy of the fate of the Jews of Eastern Europe in WW II. Just don't go expecting a comedy.