"Everything Is Illuminated"

It's extremely rare for a film to live up to a book, and in the case of Jonathan Safran Foer's acclaimed first novel, "Everything Is Illuminated," it was an uphill battle from the start.
Foer's quirky book jumped back and forth through time from Trachimbrod, the 19th Century Ukrainian shtetel of his ancestry, to a modern day journey to find a woman there who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis.
Foer's editors recognized that he is one of the most talented writers of his generation and therefore gave him free reign to narcisistically indulge his own talent. From the whimsical visits to the shtetel with its Upright Shul, where people daven while suspended from the roof, to the annual festival commemorating the drowing of a wagon driver and the heroine's marriage to a man with a saw blade embedded in his skull, Foer gave us a tour of a place too ludicrous to be real but yet to familiar to forget.
The contemporary story was filled with comic relief in the form of Alex, a Ukrainian tour guide who didn't mangle the English language (as critics said) as much as over-formalize it. ("Repose" instead of sleep, "proximal" instead of close.)
There was no way to translate all of Foer's talent onto the big screen, at least not in two hours. And so, writer and director Liev Schrieber did what most filmmakers do these days: Buy the brand identification and then do whatever the hell you want.
His film uses Foer's title and most of the same characters, as so many films based on old TV shows do these days, only to produce a film that bears almost no resemblance to its inspiration.
"Everything is Illuminated" will not be a bad film for those who haven't read the book. But those who have will find the story so truncated, and the pivotal ending so divergent, that they will feel they have seen a film loosely inspired by a small fragment of the book.
And yet the precise ending so closely approximates the book, it makes little sense given the drastic change in plot that Schrieber imposes, either for the sake of brevity or to make the film, in his view, more meaningful.
Foer's book sets up more of a conflict for Alex's grandfather, the old and bitter Ukrainian tour guide. He appears to be an anti-Semite at first. We later learn he had a Jewish best friend and had the chance to save him and didn't. Result: Guilt trip for life.
In the film, Schrieber has no time to set up the circumstances in a flashback of why the grandfather didn't save his friend, so he goes for a quick twist instead. Now the grandfather WAS a Jew who somehow was unscathed by a Nazi firing squad, and rises from a pile of corpses to doff his star of David and hide his identity the rest of his life. After visiting the site of Trachimbrod, he remembers all this and it's too much for him. He kills himself, ostensibly out of survivor guilt that has kicked in after 60 years, or simply become intolerable.
In the book he had far more reason to be guilty and far more reason to succumb to the guilt after reliving it, no longer able to repress the memory.
I suspect Schrieber saw another benefit to his retake: The crusty old man who came across like an anti-Semite was, in the end, a Jew. The message: We are the Jews, the Jews are us. The Holocaust is thus universalized.
I don't know if sticking to the original plot would have made a better movie, but as it is I was simply unmoved and unimpressed. I wonder how Jonathan Safran Foer feels about the change. If I were he, I'd simply revel in the crafting of a work of art incapable of being done justice in an inferior medium.