Elijah Wood

Performer for Our Time

Everything Is Illuminated

(2005)

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Everything Is Illuminated (2005)
Elijah Wood as "Jonathan Safran Foer"

Edward C. Patterson, site owner
Annie Graham, copy editor

Elijah Wood, in interviews, has stated that he patterned his performance after Peter Sellers in Being There, which casts Sellers in a voyeur role that carries the filmgoer through a series of visual mazes. It was a good choice of reference points (Liev Schreiber is to be credited for that). But Elijah takes this further. As Jonathan, he presents us with an introverted introvert, a person so collapsed on himself he treats the outer world as an after thought. He can come to grips with almost anything as long as his quest to collect the moments in his life (and that of his family) is not interrupted. Most of us take a photo. Jonathan bags things—in ZipLock bags, and pins them to a wall, not unlike the Wailing Wall.

Elijah Wood could have blown this part out (and I mean in the sense of a flat tire). The visuals far outweigh the dialog and whatever dialog that’s parsed is either for Eugene Hutz or in Russian (with subtitles). Yet, with perfect pacing, a stare of vacuity that changes subtly in light and color, and an imploding of emotions, Elijah Wood gives us a silent movie with some dialog side dishes. In fact, Jonathan’s magnified eyeglasses, which makes Elijah Wood’s signature eyes twice as large, and his immaculate attire, always black and white, fixes us on his very rigid search for a simple answer—who is Augustina? We are so fixed on that question and surrounded by the film’s comic aspects during the first half, that when the film switches gears, its like being drop kicked. At that point the characters find they are on a different train ride than the one they paid for—except Elijah Wood. He never makes the transition. Yet, we change our view of him as he illuminates us with the truth (unemotional truth) of the matter. In fact, the truth is very emotional, but since Elijah Wood remains deadpan during the more powerful emotional visuals, we are struck with the simple truth that the holocaust is too horrific for words, tears or anything but the vacuous stare from a young Jewish man who is witnessing the emptiness of the remains of his past. Still, what we see is collected and mounted on some Wailing Wall of our own.

Elijah Wood always chooses roles for their character arc and this one arcs as well. It doesn’t develop like most of his other roles. It doesn’t start with a lost boy who becomes a lost man. It starts with an Usher, who calmly invites himself on a journey of discovery and allows us to come along. During this journey he manages to topple his wild-ass translator, Alex and Alex’s seemingly daft grandfather. His does very little to them except insist that they continue the very rigid search until they find what is out there. The film, surprisingly becomes Alex and his grandfather’s story, discovering or rediscovering their roots. Whenever they make such defining discoveries (Illuminations), Jonathan closes his eyes or removes the glasses—symbolic of his archangelic role, the usher to the collection and its meaning. Elijah Wood arcs the character into itself with Chaplanesque genius, so he develops from an oddball to a savior, which, to Wood’s mind, are only inches from each other.

When I invoke Chaplan’s name, I don’t do it lightly. The little tramp was comedic, pathetic and prosthetic to his roles. We laugh, we cry and we are carried through the film material on his coat tails. Elijah Wood provides us with some of the funniest moments in the film (Eugene Hutz’s bastardized English aside). The potato scene is strong humor, but the punch line (or sight gag) is Elijah Wood bagging the potato, both funny and poignant. The repartee concerning sex, when Jonathan cracks a joke is funny because it doesn’t sound like a joke (and the sight gag is provided here by the seeing eye-bitch, Sammy Davis Junior Junior). This does not mean Elijah Wood plays a cardboard box. Jonathan expresses himself readily. He’s afraid of dogs. He insists on his vegetarianism. He manages to insult people through his ignorance of local customs. He tells his conveyors that "I’m not stupid, you know. I know what jid means. It means Jew." Yet, the character weighs in most powerfully when the twists occur; when Lista calls him Safran; when he stands (Frodo like) with the clump of dirt in his hands and stares at it by the river; when he hears Alex call him "John." The range of facial expressions sent shivers down this reviewer’s spine as he walks through the airport and "illuminates" the many strangers he passes, connecting with them like dots in a universal wave of humanity.

In a film as visually beautiful as Everything Is Illuminated, Elijah Wood becomes a visual aid to his collectibles, in this case the Ukrainian road trip and his conductors. He is as obsessed with his progress and collecting as much as any addict (or Nazgul), but he is the angel of light bringing a different and calmer retrospective on the holocaust and the misery of that passage in time. He reminds us that the town of Trachimbrod once lived and breathed; and that from its roots came a skein of tradition that reached to America, but was lost in the Ukraine. He connects Alex and his grandfather to that skein, and through them Trachimbrod now has a living memorial instead of a circle of sad stones and a plaque. Elijah Wood’s magnificent performance brings all the dignity this subject matter deserves and, in the words of Jonathan, "sometimes I’m afraid I’ll forget." With such skill and art applied, how can we ever forget?