Everything is Illuminated (2005)

Everything Is Illuminated is Liev Schreiber's directorial debut, you might know Liev as mainly an actor from such films as Ransom, the Scream Trilogy and of course Phantoms. Everything Is Illuminated is about a collector, Elijah Wood's character Jonathan who is trying to collect items from his Jewish families past. He ventures to Ukraine to find the lady who saved his grandfathers life in the small village he lived in during World War II. He meets up with an old man who is a tour guide of some sorts, he takes up Jewish travelers and brings them to their destinations to try and rekindle their past. There is some comedy in this film, in the form of a Ukrainian breakdancer named Alex. He brings some moments of laughter but i felt the character wasn't necessary in this film. The good of this movie consisted of the acting and performances from the actors and actresses, unfortunately the bad outweigh the good in this film. I felt that this movie could not keep its story together, it felt like it was all over the place and changed paces way too frequent for my taste. The ending is what turned me off the most, i didn't feel like they explained things well enough about Jonathan's grandfather. I did not feel like they explained how the Grandfathers character played within the village when they met up with the lady who saved Jonathan's grandfathers life. And then at the end he just kills himself? Why?

The writing was not the strong point of this film either, and it wasn't just because of the language barrier but it seemed to easy. I believe if the movie didnt change paces so much as it did it wouldn't have been so confusing towards the end. On a plus note, the movie was very well shot, the cinematographer of this film knew what they were doing. Shots like this really prove that.

Overall, i cant really recommend this film, but possibly to the casual movie viewer i would as they might not find the flaws that i found, that sounded a little pretentious but thats ok, im a pretentious guy.

6/10