Jackson Free Press

Set to the teetering-toward-the-edge-of-lunacy strains of the Ukranian punk-Gypsy band Gogol Bordello, "Everything Is Illuminated" comes on like a Molotov cocktail. By its conclusion, though, it transforms into something far mellower. And along the way, it conveys Eastern Europeans' long tradition of combining rollicking absurdity and a melancholy so deep, it pulls you along helplessly like a dingy in a cruise ship's wake.

Actor Liev Schreiber's first film as a director stands alongside freshman directorial efforts like Jodie Foster's "Little Man Tate" and Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott's "Big Night" for its skill and modesty, undoubtedly informed by the subtlety actors revere in their own craft.

Prim New York writer Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) collects the ephemera of his family's life in plastic Baggies tacked to his bedroom wall. Dentures and used condoms, photographs and underwear comprise his bone yard of the banal.

The one hole in Jonathan's archive is his grandfather, who escaped from the Ukraine to America during World War II.

Jonathan travels to Odessa where he hires two ad hoc travel guides, a cranky, bitter grandfather named Alex (Boris Leskin), and his loopy adult grandchild also named Alex (Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hutz) to help him investigate his past.

From our first view of the Odessa clan, it's clear Jonathan is in for a bumpy ride. The grumpy, slaphappy family of anti-Semites bitch over their sorry lot shepherding rich American Jews back to their homeland. None of them can understand why Americans would ever want to return to their godforsaken country. Schreiber allows us to see how absurd Jonathan's quest must look to the Odessa-ites. Only those who have escaped to a better place can luxuriate in their own history, these world-weary natives suggest.

Alex speaks with the oddly grandiose and bumbled English of a 19th-century literary hero, but he is also desperately in love with American hip-hop culture. Dressed in a Kangol hat and tracksuit, Alex longs for the distant aphrodisiac of American pop culture. American blacks are his heroes, such that he names his dog Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., though he remains indifferent to his country's own oppressed, the Jews who were swallowed up by the Final Solution.

Alex's grandfather looks like he'd be happiest 6 feet under. A terminal grump with white facial stubble, Alex Sr. claims to be blind and uses Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., as his "seeing eye bitch."

The film's quirkiness has a darker side: The multiple references to impaired sight in Sammy Davis Jr., Alex Sr.'s feigned blindness and Jonathan's thick glasses allude to the myopia of characters unable to see their pasts or futures.

The film's best feature is its ability to convey the complexities of the Eastern European character—an outward self- preserving gruffness that holds back bursting reservoirs of emotion. Natives are stern but also sentimental, and the two Alexes warm to their guest despite his incomprehensible vegetarianism.

But this odyssey to the past and the shtetl of Jonathan's grandfather's birth isn't only Jonathan's. It soon becomes clear that the elder Alex is on a journey of his own into his country's past. He keeps looking into his rearview mirror at the moon, which follows him like his own conscience.

The anti-Semitism that Alex and his grandfather display soon reveals origins in the village of the damned that Jonathan's grandfather narrowly escaped.

In an age when attention spans are short, "Everything Is Illuminated" is all the more profound as a rumination on the importance of the past.

But the biggest charm in "Everything Is Illuminated" may be how unexpected it is. Schreiber's film feels like a first film made not by an American, but by a Russian. Rather than aiming to please, the film expects a certain patience on the viewer's part as it ambles and slowly shifts from an often forced quirkiness to a bone-deep melancholy. That change of tack proves worth waiting for.

This review originally ran in Creative Loafing. "Everything is Illuminated"plays at New Stage Theatre on Monday, Feb. 20, at 7:30 p.m. Call 601-359-3347.