Everything is Illuminated

Wow. Just - wow. This is a movie starring Elijah Wood (of debatable acting talent in Lord of the Rings), playing a young, obsessive-compulsive collector of family trinkets who receives a photograph picturing his grandfather and a young woman during WWII. This woman, Augustine, apparently helped his grandfather come to America, where he met his wife and led a happy life, thanks to her.

Jonathan (Elijah), hoping to track down this woman in order to piece together his family history and to thank her for what she did for his (now deceased) grandfather, travels to the Ukraine, where he is welcomed with a marching band playing The Star Spangled Banner, and a young Ukrainian man, Alex, who says things like premium instead of first and proximal instead of close (eg "were you proximal to your grandfather?"). Alex and his grandfather, who claims to be blind and has a demented "Seeing eye bitch" named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., take Jonathan ("Jonfen") on a drive toward the city where he knew his grandfather to have lived, Trachimbrod.

At first there is humor in Alex's misuse of english and his brusque exchanges with his family and grandfather, but there's also a certain solemnity, with a really powerful soundtrack of Ukrainian music, both traditional and pop. As they approach Trachimbrod, a village that seems to have been wiped out of existence, both Jonathan and the viewer gradually become emotionally drawn into the trip and into his grandfather's past, a past that involved in some way Alex's grandfather as well, a mystery that is gradually revealed through their discovery of Trachimbrod, now existing entirely in the memory and home of a single woman, the sole remaining survivor of the Nazi's brutal pillage of the town.

Funny and moving and beautifully filmed, with stunning Ukrainian countryside that Alex's grandfather calls "the most fertile land in Eastern Europe", this was definitely an overlooked film that deserved far more attention than it received. Five stars.

Labels: entertainment

posted by Holly @ 10:42 AM