Everything is Illuminated

I couldn't remember why I put this movie in my Netflix queue. I looked at the disc and read the summary, and it sounded depressing as hell. So, it sat there for a couple of weeks, languishing. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and check it out.

I was utterly charmed by it.

Everything is Illuminated starts out as yet another quirky indie film that throws together gently amusing eccentrics and lets us reflect on the absurdity of the human condition and identify with the misfits that we all secretly are. As the film progresses, however, we start to get hints that these lives are connected in some deep and profound way. Of course, I start to assume the worst, most direct, and most over the top connections.... and I was wrong.

By the time the film gets heavy, it's earned the right. The comedy becomes poignant and meaningful, and if reality is heightened (if not magical) then so be it.

What makes the film work as well as it does is its restraint. If you watch the extra scenes, you'll find that things were cut that went way over the top in terms of eccentricity and wackiness. The tone of these clips is so at odds with the rest of the film that it's no wonder they got cut. More surprising is that they got fully filmed and edited in the first place.

Everything is Illuminated has some really lovely things to say about our relationship with the past. Jonathan grew up in a family where it is implied that people didn't really talk about the past, and he feels compelled to collect tokens of important moments with his family. As he says in the trailer, he is afraid that he will forget... so he collects these anchors for the memories he is afraid of losing. By the end of the film, he's ready to let go of these fetishes, because the past is all around him now. He will not forget, because he has not hidden from the past. He will not forget, because he has let the past touch him, and move him, and change him and thus can let go of the trinkets that he once hoarded.

This is a lovely, charming, deeply moving film that is bolstered by Eugene Hutz, Boris Leskin, and Elijah Wood. I'm putting Wood at the end of that list, because while he's the author's stand in, he's not the standout in this cast. Hutz and Leskin are marvels to behold, playing off of one another as if they truly had spent the last twenty odd years together.

Only one thing bothered me, which is that Alex, Hutz's character, says that he can't drive the American because he has other commitments at a nightclub... but he goes along as a translator. I feel like there is a scene missing somewhere, and it's not in the extra scenes. It's a minor plot hole, but one that could have probably been fixed in the editing of that one scene.