Everything is Illuminated (12A)

Still, the novel's sprawl could well have lent itself to an ambitious screen adaptation, and at the very least, actor-turned-director Liev Schreiberdeserves a respectful tip of the yarmulke for taking it on. In fact, Schreiber has adapted roughly half the novel, the present-day section, which is rather like filming 50 Years of Solitude or The 500 Nights and a Half.

Schreiber's opening shots promise far more than the film can deliver: a scan over archive photos of the pre-Second World War shtetl universe shows Jewish faces of yesteryear, greybeards, matriarchs, solemn schoolchildren, rakish musclemen. After this, the film seems a little underpopulated, and indeed, we're mostly in the company of only four characters - one a volatile dog - sitting in a Trabant as it cruises wheezily through the Ukraine's rural backwaters, in search of Trachimbrod, long fallen off the map.

Alex (Eugene Hutz), the narrator, is a young Odessa hipster working for his father's fly-by-night company, which organises heritage tours for American Jews. Alex is no more fond of Jews than his father or grandfather is, though he bristles at the suggestion that there's any kind of anti-semitic tradition in the Ukraine. But he's besotted with American culture, a break-dancing, Kangol-topped B-boy strutting his gangly stuff on Odessa's dancefloors.

Even so, it's something of a culture clash when he meets his father's new client, the earnest young Jonathan Safran Foer, as played by a gleamingly smooth-faced Elijah Wood. Unsmiling and stiff, he resembles a waxwork of Clark Kent, in his early Sixties get-up of black suit and tie, and his outsize horn-rims with thick pebble lenses that shamelessly enlarge his already moppet-like eyes when they well with tears at the film's climax. It's conceivable that we're supposed to view Safran Foer through Alex's eyes as some strange Jewish-American extra-terrestrial, but if so, there are no indications in the script to support it, and a flashback to Safran Foer as a solemnly owlish child is jarringly odd to the point of creepiness.

The two men's travelling companions - introduced with much use of comedy freeze-frames - are Alex's grumbling grandfather (Boris Leskin), who claims to be blind but is the designated driver, and the family's manic dog, whimsically named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior [sic] - a gag that was tiresome in print, and doesn't translate at all well to spoken dialogue. If this sort of goofiness appeals to you - and you have to imagine it larded with hectic oompah music, of the sort that makes Emir Kusturica's films so exhausting - then you pretty much know what you're in for, and good luck to you.

Amid Matthew Libatique's greyly textured photography, a few striking images stand out - notably, Wood in his black suit standing in the middle of a big empty room, like a schoolboy newly arrived at a Magritte boarding school. But the film over-relies on exotic single images punctuating a generally realistic travelogue - for example, a symmetrical composition of an isolated house surrounded by sunflower fields.

Schreiber's lack of a consistent grip on his material really becomes apparent towards the end, when Everything Is Illuminated takes an uncomfortable shift into "No, but seriously..." mode, its blustering tubas replaced by balalaikas and plangent harmonica. It suddenly feels as if the whole has been softening us up for its final revelations, but those revelations are handled in a way that's itself far too soft.

Memories of a Nazi firing squad are given what must be the most aesthetically dainty presentation of a Holocaust image ever seen on film: bodies artfully coated in dust and blood, and draped in flowers.

A twist ending seems to present anti-semitism as a bittersweet joke on the anti-semites, but this only serves to defuse whatever bite the film has had till then. Everything Is Illuminated is well-meaning, and not unsuggestive in its ideas about memorial and memory, but it's finally too anxious to entertain and not upset. Still, it's quite a daring achievement on Schreiber's part to make an American film in which a very high proportion of the dialogue is in Russian, with English subtitles.

Apart from Boris Leskin's cantankerousness, the film's trump card is the genially abrasive Eugene Hutz as Alex. He's the leader of self-styled "gypsy punk" band Gogol Bordello, featured on the soundtrack, and while I've now heard as much of their rumbustious jollity as I ever need to, I'd be happy to see him act again. With his bony, Fernandel-like features, he's a likeable combination of the sweetly candid and the brazenly disreputable.

j.romney@independent.co.uk