Everything is Illuminated, directed by Liev Schreiber, 2005, English and Russian with English subtitles, 105 minutes.

By Donald H. Harrison

If the phrase "Everything is Illuminated," reminds you of "They Lived Happily Ever After," you get the fractured-fable quality of this beautifully filmed travel story through the rich pasture lands and forests of the Ukraine. Although not everyone does live happily ever after, matters certainly are clearer at the end of the film than they were at the beginning. Congratulations are due to director Liev Schreiber and cinematographer Matthew Libatique for their rendering of this novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan (Ellijah Wood) as a child was prompted by his grandfather's death to begin collecting photographs, memorabilia and ephemera about his family—a collection that grew more extensive and bizarre as he grew into adulthood. All sorts of items would be dropped into see-through plastic bags, sealed, and then pinned in the jumbled order of a bulletin board or refrigerator door onto a large museum wall of his bedroom.  

Everything, it seemed, was there: a key, an unwrapped but not unrolled prophylactic, his grandmother's dentures. Two treasures of particular fascination to Jonathan were a photo of his grandfather as a young man standing in a field with a young woman, and a grasshopper sealed in amber. So Jonathan  decides to travel to the Ukraine to find the village of Trachimbord from which his grandfather escaped during the Holocaust.

He hires Alex (Eugene Hutz) , a young man of his age, to serve as his guide, and Alex brings along his eccentric grandfather (Boris Leskin)  as a driver, despite the fact that grandfather likes to pretend that he is blind.  Alex  refers to his grandfather's  pet dog, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., as his "seeing-eye bitch." English is never so colorful as in the mouth of Alex, who adds to the humor throughout the journey with his diplomatic translations of his blunt-talking, Russian-speaking grandfather's comments.  The dialogue at times sounds like a conversation between comics Adam Sandler and Yaacov Smirnov, as when Jonathan informs Alex that the singer/comedian for whom the dog was named was Jewish.  Does that mean that other Blacks also are Jewish?  Shaq for instance? Alex inquires.  No, says Jonathan.   Michael Jackson?   Definitely no, Jonathan quickly replies.

As the two young men become friends, there also are serious Holocaust issues to be explored.  Jonathan repeats the accusation that Ukrainians could have taught the Germans about anti-Semitism.  When Alex asks his grandfather if this is true, the grandfather pretends not to hear the question.  His silences become longer, the deeper into the journey they go.  He pretends not to know where Trachimbord is, but he is able to veer off the road onto an unmarked lane that leads to the former shtetl's site.  Grandfather has kept a secret since the days when Jews of Trachimbord were rounded up and executed—a secret not to be revealed here.

On their journey, the three men encounter another collector, Lista (Lauryssa Lauret), a peasant woman who lives so deep in the forest and is so unaffected by the rhythms of the outside world that she is the personification of pre-Holocaust life in the Ukraine. She knows about Trachimbord and helps to illuminate the stories of Jonathan's and Alex's grandfathers. 

The movie is well worth seeing and easily couldserve as a gentle introduction to the Holocaust for students.