I was surprised to enjoy this movie; I’d tried to read the book a few years ago and found it insufferably precious and amused by its own conceit: Author Jonathan Safran Foer writes a novel about a character named Jonathan Safran Foer, narrated by a Ukrainian with English mangled in an artificially comic way. I lasted about five pages.
The movie starts out unpromisingly, with said wacky Ukrainian mangling his English in a strenuously comic way, plus the ominous sign of static, bad-art-house close-ups of a pale, doughy Elijah Wood (as Jonathan). But once it gets going, it works, mainly thanks to Eugene Hutz as Alex, the Ukrainian translator who helps Jonathan find the village from which his father emigrated. Hutz makes the forced, broken-English dialogue sound semi-believable, and he’s just a lot of fun to watch. (He contributes a couple of rollicking songs to the soundtrack as well.)
So, for the first three-quarters of the movie, it’s a light-hearted road trip with three oddly matched travelers (Alex’s grandfather drives the car), and then suddenly it veers into the very serious and sad story of a Jewish village that was wiped out in World War II. It’s a pretty jarring shift in tone (although, given that part of the world and the way no one seems to have ever heard of the village Jonathan is searching for, it’s not exactly a surprise), such that, although it’s very sad, the emotion has been somewhat undercut by the lead-up.
Elijah Wood doesn’t have a lot to do, or maybe he’s intentionally underplaying it – it’s hard to tell. His character has an interesting habit of “collecting” – putting artifacts in little Ziploc bags to remember a person or a moment – which soured for me when he carefully scooped up a living grasshopper, put it in a small case, and enclosed the case in a tightly sealed bag. I kept waiting for him to open the bag and release it, but he never did. Uncool, man.
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