Suleyman Films

Happy (rainy if you’re in Maryland) Friday!

Last week and the week before, I wrote a bit about some games I played. I wanted to break that up for this week’s post and write about a film I recently rewatched for my MFA class: Everything is Illuminated.

One of my favorite films (easily in my top ten, which keeps changing and growing and is likely more of a “top fifty” by now), Everything is Illuminated (2005, Warner Brothers) follows a similar path to the novel of the same name. The film follows Jonathan Safron Foer (played by Elijah Wood) as he journeys to Ukraine to find the woman he believes saved his grandfather during World War Two. This quest begins when grandmother gives Jonathan a photo on her deathbed, saying that his grandfather, Safron, always wanted Jonathan to have it. The picture shows a young (and very Elijah Wood-looking Safron) with a mysterious woman: Augustine.

Jonathan, a collector of family heirlooms, sets out to Ukraine with nothing but a photo, a name, and the town where the photo seems to have been taken, Trachenbroad. He hires the lovably daft Alex (played by Gipsy rock singer Eugene Hutz), whose “not very premium” English serves as the film’s early jokes. Also included is their blind driver: Grandfather, a recently widowed, grump who insists on taking his seeing-eye dog, Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., everywhere. (Grandfather is played by Boris Leskin and is credited as having played himself in the last film the Romanian actor starred in.) The three journey across rural Ukraine until they ultimately find illumination (hey, that’s the title of the book and the movie).

Without outright summarizing and spoiling the entire film, I love the movie so much because of all the small destinations the trio encounters along the way. Many of them provide great imagery to sell the film’s setting: a country that, like much of Europe, endured the Nazis, the Soviets, and a clash of rural versus urban. Early on, we see boys playing football (that’s soccer for us Americans) on broken-down Soviet-era machinery. In one of my favorite sequences, we drive through an overgrown ghost town, where the music stops as we join the characters in watching in awe. When Jonathan asks what happened, Alex’s simple answer always elicits a chuckle: “Independence.” Then, the folksy music returns as the group resumes their journey.

The last image I want to discuss is of Alex walking through a gorgeous sunflower field. The bright yellow contrasts with much of the green grass and forests and brown wheat we’ve seen so far of Ukraine’s countryside, and it’s such a perfect way to tell us our heroes have made it. If you’ve seen the trailer or the back of the DVD (I never could find a BluRay…), you’ve seen that image, but witnessing it after the journey is something else.

Everything is Illuminated is one of the films I always look back to as the reason I began studying screenwriting. It’s a simple but incredibly memorable story, with a great mix of comedy in the first half and haunting moments in the second. I still think of the ending regularly, and one day, I hope that my work can have the same lasting impact on its readers and viewers.

One last note I wanted to mention is the ending (not the ending, just a scene from it). After Jonathan gets home, and as he walks through the airport, he encounters everyone he met during his journey, showing us that the trip will stay with him forever. When he sees the shepherd boy who flattened their tires as a kid standing with his mom, the stern hotel owner as a stewardess, and the well-digging workers as TSA agents, it’s such a charming little scene that ends the movie well.

Part of me wanted to do a spoiler-free and a spoiler-heavy blog post, but I think I’ll keep this one short and say: Everyone should see this movie. It’s cheap to rent on everyone’s favorite website (Amazon *shudders*), short at just over ninety minutes, and well worth your time.

Before I go, here is a picture of the stray cat my wife is trying to convince me to adopt.

Thanks for reading.

Disclamer: all shots from the film are property of Warner Independent Pictures, subsidiary of Warner Brothers.