| |
Here are some interesting notes about Everything Is
Illuminated, which have appeared in various trivia questions on Internet
boards or could well appear.
- The author of Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan
Safran Foer has a cameo appearance in the film. Near the end of the
film, when Elijah Wood stands before his grandfather’s grave, there’s
a panned shot of the cemetery, where a groundskeeper is blowing leaves.
Jonathan Foer plays the leaf-blower.
- Eugene Hutz is the lead performer of the Gypsy Punk
Rock group Gogol Bordello. The entire band appears in the film in a
cameo at the train station where they are hired to play the Star Spangle
Banner (rather poorly too, as a comic touch). Included in the group,
banging the drum is Pamela Racine, Elijah Wood’s current girlfriend.
- Elijah Wood, in an interview, stated he never finished
reading the book, as Liev Schreiber crafted a script that only followed
one of the work’s main stories and was presented in an entirely different
vein than the clever, word rich novel.
- Despite being about the holocaust, Everything Is
Illuminated only infers the violence of the War and the cruelty
of the Nazis. Even a close-up of a gun barrel about to fire, segues
into a bright circle of light.
- The key photograph in the film, of Safran and Augustina,
has Elijah Wood posed in sepia as the young farmer. It’s a memorable
image reminiscent of his childhood roll in The Witness where
his otherworldly look was laden with very much the same sub-text.
- Elijah Wood gave an interview with LIFE magazine where
his own photographs were showcased. In this interview, he takes to heart
the main theme of Everything Is Illuminated and speaks to the
preservation of life’s precious moments through photography. Few actors
have promoted a film with more elegance and grace. (For a transcript
of this interview press
here).
- Visually wonderful, Everything Is Illuminated
was made on a tight budget of $7 million. Thanks to artistic shots,
especially close-ups, the film shimmers with images; however, 2 cheesy
stock foot clips are inserted of Odessa and a few shots of trucks in
the Czech Republic with their large TCH decals (the film was filmed
in Prague) are almost comical as faux pas editing.
- Elijah Wood’s stoic performance marks a departure for
even him—a measured performance calculated by the inch instead of the
mile. He patterned some of it on Peter Sellers’ performance in Being
There, a roll that won him a posthumous Academy Award nomination.
- Elijah Wood had to wear special lenses under his coke
bottle glasses for his roll as Jonathan. Even though the star has poor
eyesight, the thick heavy glasses were too powerful for him to see anything.
- The old adage is never act with children and animals
(‘cause they’ll upstage you). This is Elijah’s first brush as an adult
star to act with an animal, the Officious Seeing Eye Bitch, Sammy
Davis Junior Junior. His acting with a dolphin and other dogs don’t
count, as he was a child then. He survived as an adult acting with a
child in Oliver Twist, one of his first adult roles.
- This reviewer was very pleased to see that Flatbush,
Brooklyn was used for shots in the US, particularly in the Jewish cemetery.
I was born and raised in Brooklyn and could have easily snapped up those
scenes in my own Ziploc bag.
- On the wall of the collection, there are many things
that Jonathan captures to recall moments in his life and his family
history. Included in the close-ups is a used condom, probably Jonathan’s
tribute to his own virginity loss. Although the sex subject is approached
nervously by Jonathan in the film, in the book the F word is used liberally
by him. It was excised in the script. I was surprised that this was
the first film since the LOTR trilogy that Elijah doesn’t cuss up a
storm. His last film Green Street Hooligans had him spout the
F word like popcorn.
- Elijah Wood has to be the King of the Limited release.
Although Everything Is Illuminated and Green Street Hooligans
were released within 2 weeks of each other in the US, they both are
playing at only a hand full of theaters. Black & White, The Bumblebee
Flies Anyway, All IWant/Try Seventeen, Chain of Fools and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were all limited Elijah Wood releases;
Chain of Fools went straight to DVD.
- Even though Elijah’s performance is very different
in Everything Is Illuminated, there are still some famous trademarks
evident (other than his saucer blue eyes). One is how he stands and
gazes at a lump of dirt in his hands. We see this same pose in other
films—The War, Oliver Twist, and most famously, The Fellowship
of the Ring, when he stares at the One Ring on the banks of the
River Anduin.
- The Sunflower field that surrounds Lista’s cottage
is magnificent and planted a year ahead of the shooting to get the exact
essence of this pivotal scene. Shades of Hobbiton and Peter Jackson,
mayhap?
|
|
