A young American's bumpy search for his Old World heritage drives Everything Is Illuminated actor Liev Schreiber's directorial debut.
By Rob Kendt
Not all road-trip movies are free-wheeling romps set on the open highways of America. Last year's The Motorcycle Diaries, for instance, followed a young Ernesto "Che" Guevara on his seminal, radicalizing travels through South America. And one of the prototypes of the genre, 1967's Two for the Road, traced the courtship and rocky marriage of its leads, played by Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, through a series of sleek cars and European locations. In a far less stylish car, traversing much bumpier Eastern European roads, is the unlikely quartet featured in Warner Independent's new film Everything Is Illuminated, based on Jonathan Safran Foer's acclaimed first novel: a young American searching for his grandparents' Ukrainian village, a cheery local tour guide named Alex, a grumpy driver who happens to be Alex's own grandfather, and a slightly deranged mutt named Sammy Davis Jr., Jr. Theirs is not an auspicious outing: The few maps that haven't been eaten by the dog are sketchy, no one around seems to have heard of the village "Trachimbrod," Alex's grandfather would rather sleep than drive, and Sammy Davis Jr., Jr., when not hurling herself against the windows, has a tendency to fill the car with her flatulence. Her hand-lettered T-shirt, in deference to the grandfather/driver's alleged blindness, reads "Officious Seeing-Eye Bitch." Indeed, for all the circles and back-tracks its characters make over torn-up back roads of the Ukraine, Everything Is Illuminated might more accurately be called a "rut" movie. Setbacks aside, it is a journey of significance nevertheless, as its writer/director Liev Schreiber explains. "I had been thinking of going to the Ukraine and tracing my own grandfather's heritage, so I was lucky to stumble on Jonathan's book," says Schreiber, an accomplished actor of stage (Glengarry Glen Ross) and screen (The Manchurian Candidate) who makes his directing debut with Illuminated. "What I love so much about Jonathan's book is that it's a younger generation's perspective on history and Jewish culture. For many young people, being Jewish really means nothing more than, 'My grandfather was a Jew, so I suppose I am.' As one gets older, you start to wonder if patterns are repeating themselves, and that maybe you could see something in your family's history that would explain the way you are." The novel's quest inevitably brings all its characters face to face with Europe's darkest chapter, the Holocaust. The fictional shtetl of Trachimbrod, it turns out, was utterly erased by the invading Nazis in 1943, with no small help from their Ukrainian counterparts. A painful contemplation of this crime is a central event in the novel, as the characters are led by the village's one surviving member, an aged gypsy named Lista, through an utterly empty field where Trachimbrod once stood. But Schreiber suggests that, in the vast scope of the family history uncovered by the lead character of Illuminated, the Holocaust is "sort of a drop in the bucket. That was just such a major event, it's hard to avoid it if your parents are from Europe. It's not a Holocaust movie; more than anything, it's about the desire to know your past, your history." What he wanted to capture from the novel, Schreiber says, is that the author "is almost in love with the cultural history of his own family, and he feels that knowing that will somehow fill him as a person. In my own life, I've always had a pathological memory problem - I always feel, 'If I don't write this down, catalogue these events, I'll forget them.' That's a lot of what guided me in my approach to adapting it." In the novel, the narrative alternates between a lead character, also named Jonathan, who unspools a magical-realist yarn about Trachimbrod's colorful, often violent, apparently very libidinous past, and Alex, the young Ukrainian guide with a hilariously incomplete grasp of English. A typical Alex-ism: "I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa." The film version contains more of the Alex chapters than the fanciful Trachimbrod ones - and not only because Schreiber himself had limited currency to disseminate. The Alex material is what initially caught his attention, when The New Yorker printed an excerpt titled "The Very Rigid Search." "It basically was the story of Jonathan heading out with Alex and his grandfather to find Trachimbrod," Schreiber recalls. "Telling that story was the only feasible idea for a film, because it was pretty low-budget and I had relatively limited resources. I also felt that it sort of contained the germ of the book; it seems to be most active narrative journey of the book, and it captured spirit of the story." Also taken by that spirit was the pale, boyish Elijah Wood, who plays Jonathan. Wood's star rose decisively with The Lord of the Rings, but he had already etched an indelible series of performances as sensitive, confused young men in The Ice Storm, The War and Radio Flyer. He may not seem the most obvious choice for the easily rankled, dog-averse vegetarian portrayed in the book - a younger Schreiber, in fact, might have been perfect for the part. But Schreiber says it was Wood who campaigned for the role. "A lot of it was Elijah's enthusiasm," Schreiber says of Wood's casting. "I was bowled over by how he responded to the script. There's a great innocence to Elijah. He's got the most incredible eyes, which is really important when we're subjectively seeing so much of the film through a character's eyes." Apart from his own personal identification with the search for an Old World heritage, Schreiber says there was another, more geopolitical angle to the story that appealed to him - and that Wood's guileless performance was a key element in it. "It's no coincidence that Jonathan and I were talking about making the film in the fall of 2001, shortly after Sept. 11," Schreiber recalls. He says he saw in the novel's quixotic trans-Atlantic quest a chance to "offer the international community a different kind of American character, one who's vulnerable, not aggressive and dominant - who is, in fact, in need of an outside world and open to it. And, more importantly than anything [else], looking for his roots beyond his own country. "I'd been working in Europe and in Eastern Europe and I was hearing the most horrible things about Americans. I felt I wanted badly to offer some alternative to what they were getting on CNN. For me, Elijah was that - is that. He's gentle and good-natured." The film's limited budget meant that Schreiber had to forego one delicious image that gives the book its title. Apart from the obvious mental enlightenment signified by "illuminated" - what its author has called "an arc from ignorance to knowledge, from inexperience to wisdom" - there's also an indelible, fanciful image in the book describing a particularly festive night in early 19th-century Trachimbrod, when nearly everyone in the town was making love, collectively producing a "coital radiance" that would be visible from outer space some 150 years later. "I tried so many different ways to incorporate that into the script," Schreiber says sheepishly. "It's such a literary image. I'd written a scene of the 1969 moon landing with a close-up of Neil Armstrong's helmet, and in it you see a reflection from Earth of the light of Trachimbrod. But I had to consider the budget." As Armstrong himself might agree, even small steps can signify giant leaps. |
