"Everything Is Illuminated" for Book-Worms and Movie-Buffs Alike

Everything is Illuminated was first introduced to me by way of movie preview. The film - featuring Eugene Hutz (whom you may know as the lead-singer of the radio-friendly gypsy-punk band, Gogol Bordello) and the more commonly known, Elijah Wood - was adapted from Jewish-American author, Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel in 2005.

I've been obsessed with this film ever since I saw it, but had never found the time to sit down and actually read the words from which my beloved movie had been derived...until now. After finishing the novel, I sat down to watch the film for, probably, my seventeenth time, and realized how perfectly the film captured Foer's humor but also his heart-felt poignancy. Both the movie and novel, I highly recommend.

The book imposes rhetorical and literary elements, such as metafiction (in which a reader feels a sense of mistrust in the writer's blurring of reality or truth) and numerous characters and objects serving as metaphorical symbols. All of which are complicated to properly execute through media, and therefore, completely abandoned by actor-gone-director, Leiv Schreiber. However, this is not to say that the film is a let-down. In fact, much of the dialogue, and most of the plot line, follow strictly along with Foer's novel.

The story both the book and movie portray is the journey of an American-Jew, Jonathan Safran Foer (whether the book is a memoir or auto-biographical is never made clear in either source) as he searches for a mysterious woman named, Augustine, who saved his grandfather from death at the hands of German facism.

During the young hero's trek, he meets a string of interesting and coloral characters. First, there is Alexander Perchov, played by Hutz, an early-twenties Ukrainian, obsessed with American hip-hop music and muscular cars. Perchov's grandfather, an old, bitter man with a foul mouth and a stubborn insistance that he is "blind". Lastly, there is the Perchovs' dog, Sammy Davis, Jr. Jr., whom is introduced to Jonathan at the airport when he arrives in the Ukraine as his driver's "seeing eye bitch". Together, the four of them travel across the lush Eastern European landscape, in which, the film has a pro Foer's book can't boast - excellent cinematography and the bragging rights of filming on location, providing viewers with a post-card worthy shot almost every scene.

I don't want to give away the ending, which does have a bit of a twist, and is a subtle commentary on the burden of carrying a secret and being ashamed of one's own life, but in the end, Everything Is Illuminated doesn't leave you with a happy or a sad feeling. In both the exquisitly executed film adaption and the debut novel of a young and up-and-coming author - in the end, simply, everything is illuminated, and both show its viewers and readers that the truth is indifferent to the reactions of those who percieve it.

Watch the trailor! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSUOUU4oukc

Get to know the author! http://en.wikipedia.ord/wiki/Jonathan_Safran_Foer