The Mall Diva is interested in just about any movie that features Elijah Wood so awhile back I placed Everything is Illuminated in our Netflix queue. I hadn’t heard of the movie when it came out in 2005, the on-line synopsis didn’t tell me much and the cover art was kind of weird, but I put it on the list and it eventually worked it’s way up and arrived at our house a couple of weeks ago. Last Saturday night my family got around to watching it. Perhaps because the film had come in “under the radar” so to speak, it’s affect was more powerful (at least for me). The story is simple to summarize: Elijah Wood plays a young, introverted Jewish man obsessed with collecting artifacts of his life and his family’s history. He travels to the Ukraine to try and find the woman who helped his grandfather escape from the Nazis in World War II. He hires an interpreter, Alex, a young man who fancies himself a Ukrainian John Travolta ala Saturday Night Fever, and gets Alex’s grandfather in the package. The grandfather is a bitter, bigoted old man who imagines he is blind (even though he is the driver for the group) and has a demented seeing eye dog named Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr. (yes, two “Jrs.”). The story is essentially a road movie as they search for the lost village of Trachimbord, only this road runs through the nearly deserted Ukrainian country-side and their vehicle is a rattletrap Trabaunt. To say the film is a little quirky is like saying Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow is little swishy — but in both cases this works in a delightfully surprising way.

The film moves at a slow but not heavy-handed pace, “illuminated” by brief, almost surrealistic dialog, comfortable silences, perfect facial expressions, fabulous cinematography and Alex’s distinctive narration. It begins as an off-beat comedy and gradually morphs into an affecting drama. In the same way, you start out thinking the movie is one character’s story and it actually turns out to be another’s. Even the smallest roles are very well acted, leading to memorable scenes that still come back to me unexpectedly several days later.

The story doesn’t have the slam-bang plotting of so many movies today, but it still grips you and draws you in — if only to see what’s going to happen. Because it deals with the events of World War II we know there are going to be elements of tragedy in the story and in what is uncovered, but these are handled deftly without graphic and extended violence. Almost all of this is left to your imagination, and is all the more powerful for it. The story isn’t exactly heart-warming, but it is heart-stirring. I highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for a reflective, well-crafted movie with an extremely satisfying story. The language and some references are a little coarse in a couple of instances but the movie is generally appropriate for the family though it is not likely to resonate very much with younger viewers.

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