It was only a matter of time before someone decided to make Jonathan Safran Foer’s smash debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, into a major motion picture. The adaptation would have to be a difficult task given the novel’s complex multi-layering and meta-textual indulgences, but actor Liev Schreiber could have conceivably been an artist suitable to tackle the project. Perhaps he’d be a first time writer-director free to discover an individual aesthetic, with sensitivity toward retaining the book’s unique language and literary structure—Schreiber has stated a personal connection to the book because of the recent death of his grandfather. Unfortunately, everything about Everything Is Illuminated reeks of a neutering job. From the bland tagline, “Leave normal behind,” to the inexplicable decision to cut out a significant portion of the novel, the entire project seems intent on draining a vital (if not quite as stunning as its admirers claim) work of literature, transforming it into a tidy, predictable linear narrative designed for maximum inoffensiveness.

Surely there have been novels more resistant to adaptation than Everything Is Illuminated—after all, Cronenberg employed unorthodox methods to keep close to the spirit of Burrough’s seemingly impenetrable Naked Lunch. So it’s inexcusable that Schreiber (who adapted the book himself) should rip the heart and soul out of Everything Is Illuminated for the sake of going it risk-free. Foer’s novel details his eponymous main character’s voyage to the Ukraine in search of a woman only known as Augustine who saved his grandfather’s life during the Nazi invasion. The voyage brings him in contact with Alex, a guide and translator who also narrates the story from the present while penning letters to Jonathan. The fictional Jonathan, meanwhile, “writes” the magical realist chapters tracing the lineage of his family in the old Ukrainian village of Trachimbrod. Alex often comments on these flights of fancy in his letters. It’s a postmodern tangle that Schreiber entirely chooses to avoid dealing with cinematically. The film has nothing of Jonathan’s imagined Trachimbrod, which takes up about half the novel and constitutes the emotional core of a story about the destruction of a culture and the individuals who lived it. Schreiber removes all complexities: Alex’s violent relationship with his father, his surly grandfather’s hidden secrets from the war, the self-reflexive insights about representation and exaggeration, anything that doesn’t fit into a clear conflict-clear resolution format. The storyline is narrowed to Jonathan’s arrival in the Ukraine and the “very rigid search” for Augustine.

If any changes were going to take place, Schreiber could have toned down the more annoying elements of Foer’s book, most notably Eugene Hutz’s Balki Bartokomous imitation which passes for Alex’s broken English—just one hint of the condescension toward non-American cultures running throughout Everything Is Illuminated. Instead, Schreiber retains Alex’s pseudo-malapropisms and heightens the book’s cute-factor with an introduction that reduces all the major characters to cardboard cutouts. Alex is a borderline caricature in the novel, for sure, but Foer eventually imbues him with deeper intimations of maturity, guilt, sadness, and wisdom. Schreiber, however, doesn’t bother with subtle character development. At film’s beginning Alex (Hutz, from the band Gogol Bordello) lets the audience in on his fantasy life, where he woos the ladies at the dance clubs while sporting flamboyant hip-hop threads. That ridiculous image remains throughout the film, something the compromised ending cannot possibly redeem.

For his part, fictional Jonathan Safran Foer gets the full Wes Anderson treatment—never has an actor appeared more awkward and uncomfortable than Elijah Wood as a deadpan nerd in an ill-fitting suit and aquarium glasses. Schreiber fails to create a rounded character, so instead relies on shortcuts: framing him in head-on, symmetrical shots and giving him a precious eccentricity (collecting family mementos in Ziploc bags). Apparently these signs are supposed to point to the smart, neurotic and, ultimately, lovable aspects of Jonathan’s personality, but they simply make him freakish. Was Schreiber afraid of the challenges that might be involved in creating a visible screen presence from a character that fills a more difficult role—author surrogate/sidelined catalyst—in the book? Or did he feel that the cuter, more easily digestible side of Foer’s inventions would hook audiences? Or maybe Wood as Foer is supposed to be a satire of Foer (a minor celebrity since the novel’s success) himself. In any case, the resulting debacle stems directly from Schreiber’s miscalculations.

But then, the film Everything Is Illuminated is one huge, gaping miscalculation. Schreiber focuses on the most obvious moments of scatological and gastronomical humor from the novel while throwing the novel’s reflections on storytelling, history, love, sex, and eternity into the trash. Alex’s grandfather’s flagellant mongrel “bitch,” Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior gets ample screen time, of course. So does the running gag about Jonathan’s vegetarianism. Threadbare as it is, Foer’s streamlined plot now makes the “rigid search” seem not so rigid and not much of a search. The tension resides weakly in Jonathan’s inability to understand his place as a foreign presence, and in Alex’s grandfather’s passive-aggressive anti-Semitic comments. When Jonathan, Alex, and Grandpa finally find Lista, Augustine’s sister, no sense of pathos, bathos, or catharsis arrives, even as contrived Tim Burton­esque images of wonder and vivid color (an endless field of sunflowers, a river of lost objects) attempt to impart such feelings. Schreiber does nothing to earn our trust or attention for his film: the (dramatically reduced) story of Jonathan’s grandfather, the destruction of Trachimbrod, and the fate of Augustine become mere recitations instead of powerfully revealed histories.

The most significant alteration in the film version of Everything Is Illuminated is more than frustrating—it’s seriously troubling. The “illumination” at the novel’s conclusion refers, in part, to Alex’s grandfather’s secret past as a Gentile forced by Nazis to point out his Jewish best friend in order to save the life of himself and his family. Schreiber changes this revelation so that Alex’s grandfather’s secret past is that he himself is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi atrocities in the same village as Lista. The director can’t resist messing with audience expectations, though, and annoyingly drops hints (in hackneyed, washed-out flashbacks) that Alex’s grandfather was a German soldier. That’s what makes the film’s own “illumination” all that more cowardly. With unpunctuated prose in the grandfather’s monologue, Foer renders painful and immediate the unfathomably horrific choices good people are forced to make; Schreiber, on the other hand, suggests that shared histories must necessarily exclude moral ambiguity—it’s so much prettier to discover lovable characters sharing similar experiences of victimization. Furthermore, due to this change, the suicide of Alex’s grandfather makes significantly less sense in the film. Schreiber’s sloppy pick-and-choose adaptation strategy is most ineffective and egregious at this critical juncture.

Which begs the question: Why, if this project was so personal to him, did Schreiber translate Everything Is Illuminated into a story of little emotional resonance and visual imagination? After laying waste to Foer’s intricate if imperfect novel, what did he think his film would have to say? In trying to answer these semi-rhetorical questions, I’m divided between thinking of Everything Is Illuminated as an exemplar of a current cinema that circumvents the trickier issues of representing genocide and its psychic aftermath and thinking of it as an exemplar of the current inertia of independent filmmaking. But maybe it’s hasty to ascribe such a failure to larger patterns. Mediocrity does indeed get enforced in such a money-conscious industry like the movies, but enough vital filmmakers and filmmaking exist to suspect that Everything Is Illuminated is Liev Schreiber’s own fault and responsibility.