Detouring from the novel, 'Everything' ends up a touching road movie

September 23, 2005|Globe Staff

The history of cinema is littered with the corpses of brilliant first novels turned into dud movies, and one approaches the film version of ''Everything Is Illuminated" with more nervousness than usual. Jonathan Safran Foer's celebrated 2002 book was nothing if not writerly, dancing among multiple time periods and narrators, playing with accents and malapropisms, careening from slapstick to the Holocaust and back again. Parts of the novel were intensely moving, while others were so aggressively clever you wanted to strap Foer down with a pot of decaf and the collected works of Ernest Hemingway.

How do you make a movie out of such an overexuberant wingding? Taking the ''it takes a thief to catch a thief" approach, this smart literary debut has been brought to the screen by a smart first-time filmmaker, actor and acclaimed stage director Liev Schreiber. Schreiber has a strong visual sense and a way with actors; he has fashioned a whimsical, occasionally touching road movie that may enchant audiences who haven't read the book. He has an interesting career ahead of him. But fans of Jonathan Safran Foer may rightly consider this an act of taxidermy. ''Everything Is Illuminated" hasn't been adapted so much as gutted, stuffed, and mounted.

In Schreiber's defense, something had to go. Here that means the historical segments set in the shtetl of Trachimbrod that took up almost half the book. All those fiercely scribbled magical-realist passages of 18th-century, 19th-century, 20th-century Jewish life -- gone, goodbye. ''Everything" tells the other half of the story, of a tightly wound young American named Jonathan Safran Foer (played by that noted Jew Elijah Wood) who journeys to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Hiring a young Ukrainian named Alex (Eugene Hutz) whose greatest gift is his wild-and-crazy mangling of the English language, Jonathan embarks on an initially comic tour through the post-Soviet scrap heap, with Alex's cranky grandfather (Boris Leskin) and a mongrel named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior along for company.