To avoid frustration with Liev Schreiber's adaptation of "Everything Is Illuminated," it's important to take several factors into consideration: The first is that this is not Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything Is Illuminated," or at least not the entirety of a book that nearly everybody I know thinks was slightly overrated. Attempts to minimize the movie because it lacks the depth and digressions of the novel really aren't going to get anybody anywhere. Similarly, viewing Elijah Wood's mannequin-like Jonathan as the film's focus would be a distraction. Yes, Wood gives as inert a performance as you're likely to see from a leading man, but "Illuminated" ultimately isn't his story and there's no reward in treating it as such.

In Schreiber's hands, "Illuminated" has been focused into the simple tale of a young man who goes searching for clues about his own past, but becomes a facilitator for a deeper story about the difficulties of burying or abandoning personal and national histories. With his placid demeanor and dauntingly thick glasses, Jonathan isn't much of a hero, but he's a very good window through which to view the world.

The plot of "Illuminated" is only worth describing in abstract. Young Jonathan is an aspiring writer, but really he's a collector, putting together a vast museum of family memorabilia. And old picture, passed along from his grandfather to his grandmother and down to him leads Jonathan to wonder about the mysterious woman who helped his grandfather escape the Holocaust.
While his trove of treasures includes all sorts of inanimate trinkets and tchotchkes, what Jonathan seems to collect best is human characters. His search leads him to Ukraine, where he takes a Jewish Heritage Tour. His driver is known only as Grandfather (Boris Leskin), a bitter old man who became convinced that he was blind after the death of his wife. Translating is Alex (Eugene Hutz), a young man with a great respect for American popular culture and a grasp of the English language which is -- as he puts it -- less than premium. Rounding out the quartet is Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., a mangy mutt with anti-social tendencies who serves in a symbolic capacity, as Grandfather's officious seeing-eye bitch, as Alex puts it. A driver who can't see? A translator who can't translate? A helper dog who's more a hindrance than a help? And they're all heading for a village that can't be found on any map? Yup. It's that kind of literary world.

Narrated, generally with humorous intent, by Alex, "Everything Is Illuminated" quickly notes the contempt that the Ukrainian characters have for the American Jews on their heritage tours. They don't understand why somebody would spend good money to leave the comfort of the United States to come wallow in poverty and misery from many decades ago.

Schreiber conspires to hook viewers into the story with broad comedy and then he twists the tone subtly as the characters approach their destination. The road trip is a perfect venue for Alex's malapropisms (a trick of language that plays better on the page) and occasional bits of physical humor. Although Jonathan is a blank slate, his status as an American -- and the presumption that when Americans travel the world they bring both money and a sense of entitlement -- produces reactions from other characters that sometimes verge on farce. Alex hiring a small band to play "The Star Spangled Banner" for the newly arrived Jonathan pays no dividends, but the pasty-faced tourist's vegetarianism becomes a running joke that illuminates the cultural difference between a people who just eat when food is available and a wealthier nation that has the nerve to be picky.

As the lost town of Trachimbrod gets closer, Alex becomes more serious, Jonathan becomes more passive and the driving force of the film becomes Grandfather. Alex and Jonathan are just along for the ride, but Grandfather's story is the story of the land and it's the only way to understand Ukraine and the people who lived and died there. It's not a funny place, but Schreiber transitions fluidly.

In his first tour behind the camera, Schreiber flaunts his Eastern European cinematic influences and his own indie background so that the film looks like Kusterica by way of Jarmusch by way of Mikhalkov. That means that his landscapes are sprawling, his interiors are spare and carefully arranged, his supporting characters are all grotesques (to varying degrees) and the whole thing is just a bit overcalculated. Too often in the first half, the quirky characters, distorted perspectives and lengthy pauses come across as Wes Anderson-lite. With an assist from cinematographer Matthew Libatique Schreiber eventually manages to make the wheat fields and goats and sheep of the Ukrainian (or Czech Republic posing as Ukrainian) countryside seem like a character and certain images -- particularly a house located in the midst of a field of blooming sunflowers -- are genuinely breathtaking.

Schreiber really uses Wood as just another piece of set dressing, framing the former Hobbit instead of directing him to a performance. Some viewers may read sensitivity or intelligence onto Wood's unchanging visage, but the actor's general immobility stunts the first half of the movie.

Beginning as an idiotic variation on Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakhstani TV journalist Borat (albeit played by an actual Ukrainian-born actor), first-time thespian Hutz gets to develop Alex through a full character arc and acquits himself well, going from klutzy and theatrical to genuinely moving. Leskin doesn't let Grandfather change very much, but the veteran Russian actor has a classic time-worn face and works the character backward, justifying the bitter, detached man we meet at the beginning of the film.

"Everything Is Illuminated" is a somewhat different sort of Holocaust film. It doesn't linger on death camps or mass graves so much as the world left behind, the impact on those who survived and the gaps left by the deceased. Enough stories have focused on the American abroad finding himself and although "Illuminated" is somewhat hamstrung by what appears to be a gaping hope in its center, by shedding light on the people at the margins of the main story, it serves its purpose well.