“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is pretty much the last of this year’s supposedly major holiday movies to be unveiled for the press and public, and if I were director Stephen Daldry (he of “The Hours” and “Billy Elliot”), I might’ve wanted to sit on it a bit longer. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but something worse, an irritating and enervating one. A longtime theater director who made the switch to film in the early 2000s, Daldry has a propensity for pretty, almost vampiric movies that are elegantly staged but drain the life out of their source material — and Foer’s novel didn’t have too much of that to begin with. A whimsical fable about an overly precious and eccentric 9-year-old, loaded down with Asperger-ish tics and phobias, who goes on a self-appointed citywide treasure hunt after his father dies in the twin towers, “Extremely Loud” always struck me as a sentimental contrivance. (I started the book and couldn’t finish it.)

Daldry and screenwriter Eric Roth remove some of the book’s more maddening byways and curlicues (such as the epistolary back story of the main character’s German grandparents) but can’t evade its biggest problems. What they wind up with is something like an especially slow-moving and unnaturally grave Wes Anderson movie, with a hero you constantly want to smack, mixed with an after-school special about grief and healing. Throw in a bunch of awkward, still-life supporting performances — Sandra Bullock, Max von Sydow, Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, all sitting around looking sad — skillful cinematography by British vet Chris Menges and a Minimalist orchestral score by Alexandre Desplat, and it all adds up to something that looks and feels classy yet is really minor-league schmaltz.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell (played by one-time “Teen Jeopardy” contestant Thomas Horn, in his acting debut) feels like a literary creation all the way, a precocious and painfully odd city kid who’s afraid of almost everything and way too dependent on his dad, a Manhattan jeweler named Thomas. (You know, I like Tom Hanks, and he’s perfectly OK in this role, but he’s almost the last guy I would consider to play a New York shopkeeper of German and/or Jewish extraction.) Thomas has constructed a long-running scavenger hunt designed to draw Oskar out of his shell, and purportedly to solve the mystery of the missing “sixth borough” of New York City, which was dragged away at some point by secretive authorities for unknown reasons. This quest is interrupted after Thomas is vaporized in the World Trade Center, and the traumatized Oskar conceals his father’s last phone messages from his mother (Bullock). But when Oskar finds a key hidden inside a vase in his dad’s closet, he thinks it’s a clue from beyond the grave, and sets out on a mission to interview all 800-odd New Yorkers who share the surname Black (which was written on the envelope that held the key).

I get that you either have to suspend your disbelief and travel with the tambourine-jingling, subway-phobic Oskar from Fort Greene to Hamilton Heights to Astoria to Broad Channel — enjoying the journey and not fixating on the destination, etc. — or simply bail out, but I was supposed to write this review and couldn’t do the latter. In a larger sense, the problem with Daldry’s film is that it’s much too polite and pretty and classed-up, and lacks the nebbishy intensity and conviction that Foer’s mock-Salinger universe at least pretends to possess. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” demanded the real Wes Anderson or, better still, Michel Gondry — someone who would treat Oskar’s filing systems and maps and sets of regulations and French Foreign Legion-style accessories with the utmost seriousness, and even make them the point of the whole enterprise.

What we get instead is frankly a drag, a slow-moving tale of healing and redemption with a low-wattage resolution you’ll glimpse miles away and a whole bunch of trailing loose ends. (Two of the major questions you’re asking yourself after reading my plot synopsis are never answered.) Oh, it’s enjoyable enough when von Sydow’s on hand as Oskar’s mysterious European grandfather, mostly because the titanic Swede is always terrific even when absolutely silent (as here). I did hear a little sniffling around me in the darkness, so if you’re an easy mark you may need a hankie. But, for the love of God, a movie that’s about 9/11 and autism and growing up without a dad should leave you crying buckets, and this one is too restrained and arty and highfalutin — I believe the correct expression in Daldry’s homeland would be “piss-elegant” — even to accomplish that.

But surely 9/11 was a special case? An attack so catastrophic, with such a high death toll and striking so hard at the root of American complacency must have unique import, a significance that, in turn, only novelists have the power to address at length and in depth, with the intimate imagination that fiction is uniquely suited to employ. Right?

That, at least, is the idea that perceptibly impresses itself upon every novel set in or after 2001. Yet, looking back over the decade, even the best of these books can’t seem to do more than circle around a void.

There are outright 9/11 novels, like Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” or Jay McInerney’s “The Good Life,” and those dealing with some aspect of the aftermath, like Amy Waldman’s “The Submission” or Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland.” Even a novel that has nothing much to do with the attack — Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” say, or Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad” — is obliged to at least genuflect in that direction, stopping at some point to mention how disturbed its characters were as they sat mesmerized in the blue glow of their TVs for a few days or weeks in 2001. Then whatever the story is really about kicks in again.

It’s all a bit perfunctory — almost, if never quite, provoking a roll of the eyes. Which is not to say that these novels depict 9/11 falsely. To the contrary; they get it pretty much right. A novelist deals in the winding and unwinding of long strands of cause and effect, in the reasons people do things and the often unanticipated results they get. The novel is about what matters to an individual and the way this affects how he or she chooses to live. It is, in short, an engine for finding and generating meaning, which is why it is fundamentally at odds with the horrific interruption of that day: At its heart, 9/11 was meaningless.

I realize that sounds inflammatory, but hear me out. The terrorist assault on New York and Washington, D.C., was historically momentous. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six human beings died, most of them leaving behind devastated loved ones. Those deaths became the pretext for two wars, a major curtailment of civil liberties in America and human rights abroad, an orgy of patriotic chest-thumping and genuine soul-searching, the expansion of a largely unaccountable intelligence and security apparatus, the demonization of billions of peaceable Muslims by opportunistic demagogues, and so on and so on. Don’t even get me started on the economy. But all of these things constitute our response to those 3,000 murders and the hideously spectacular way in which they were achieved. They don’t change the nature of the deaths themselves, which were abrupt and unanticipated, as is the case with most disasters.

The great exceptions were the police, firefighters and others who died trying to save people from the burning towers in New York. Maudlin efforts to exploit their sacrifice for political, rhetorical or commercial purposes shouldn’t obscure the fact that these rescuers were brave and heroic. But a firefighter who dies trying to pull people from a garden-variety house fire in Queens is no less brave or heroic. The civilians who perish in that fire or in a six-car pileup caused by black ice on an interstate or in a boat caught in a sudden storm or in a massacre by a gun-toting maniac in an IHOP are just as dead and just as fiercely mourned by their friends and family as those who died on 9/11. Do their deaths have less meaning because we keep telling ourselves that the deaths of 9/11 have more?

These are the sorts of questions that seep in once you move past thinking about 9/11 the way we’re instructed to think about it and start to really think about it. And that is, in essence, the novelist’s job: to explore life as it is lived instead of how it’s talked about or photographed or editorialized or TV-movied. Yet it’s not possible to disentangle the suffering of 9/11 from the media surrounding it because the media is why the atrocity was perpetrated. These killings were designed and styled for the camera, catering to it in every way.

For this reason, image culture has a different relationship to the attacks, which served as a nightmare confirmation of its bad conscience. There was a queasy symmetry in the jihadis’ serving up the destruction of the towers to a society whose favorite entertainment consists of watching so many gigantic explosions. The spectacle was at once the worst sight in the world and exactly the kind of footage every news organization covets and every viewer tunes in to see.

Charged with looking beneath, behind and around such images, the novelist comes up against the question of what makes these particular violent deaths so very different from every other violent death. That isn’t easy to answer, and any answer you do come up with is likely to sound disrespectful, cynical, unfeeling and insufficiently solemn. A novelist may decide to push onward anyway, whether into sentimentality (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”) or smarmy self-aggrandizement (“The Good Life”), but in such cases, the results feel thin, vaguely false and meretricious. “It’s kryptonite to novelists,” a critic friend of mine once said about 9/11.

More thoughtful writers have opted to treat the attacks only glancingly, or to transfigure them metaphorically. Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Leftovers” — set in a world from which millions of people have abruptly and inexplicably vanished — shows how the prerogatives of fiction can be used to isolate the human losses of 9/11 from the endless tangles of ideological grandstanding, finger-pointing and chance-grabbing that followed. James Hynes’ “Next” places its self-absorbed, discontented middle-aged protagonist at the center of an imaginary but very similar attack so that he can really live for the first time in the moments before his death. Waldman’s “The Submission” chooses to focus on how quickly tragedy degenerates into media circus in the controversy over a memorial.

The deaths at the center of all this, however, remain stubbornly impermeable to interpretation. It’s rare that any death can be called meaningful. A few of us, like the firefighters who charged into the World Trade Center, will end up giving our lives for something we believe in, but the rest of us will simply lose them. Sometimes other people will be to blame for that loss, and sometimes not. Most of the people to blame will be merely negligent — careless food preparers or healthcare providers, for example — but a handful, like the 9/11 hijackers, will be malevolent. And only a percentage of those who kill deliberately will do so for reasons that make any kind of sense. We scrabble for explanations, like the commentators who looked for ideological scapegoats after a lunatic shot U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last year, but that doesn’t mean they’re there.

Our ancestors lived with the understanding that sudden, senseless death lurked around every corner, whether it came in the form of invading Mongols, Crusaders or Vikings; by storm, flood, earthquake, volcano or fire; or by plague, drought or famine. Modern Americans don’t face (all) the same threats, but most of us seem to believe that a protective bubble is not only possible, but our God-given right. The 9/11 attacks could have reminded us of how delusional this dream is, but instead they became an occasion for citizens to demand a ludicrous promise of safety from their government. Much of what we have given up as a nation was sacrificed for the sake of this illusion, for the chance to go on lying to ourselves.

Perhaps the best thing any novelist wrote about 9/11 wasn’t a novel at all but a short essay by David Foster Wallace about the paring away of our civil liberties, published in the Atlantic in 2007. He pointed out that there are 40,000 highway fatalities every year, more than 10 times the toll of 9/11 and more than double the annual homicide rate. Those deaths are the price we are quite willing to pay for the freedom to drive around in our own cars, so why aren’t we also willing to tolerate risk for the sake of “the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious”? He might as well have asked why we’ve decided that the 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 mean more than the tens of thousands lost on our nation’s roads.

Great fiction is a kind of lie that tells the truth, but it’s impossible to lie about lies and end up with anything besides more lies. The violent deaths of 9/11 were special to the extent than any human being’s untimely death is special, but how to untangle that from the common — if usually unspoken — belief that they were special because that sort of thing doesn’t happen to Americans, to people like us? It may be impossible to challenge that belief without also seeming to diminish the horror of those deaths and the grief of the survivors; the baby has swallowed the bathwater.

What the truth-seeking novelist is left with is a handful of minutes, maybe as much as an hour, running themselves out in a burning building. Hynes has probably done the best that any writer can with those minutes, and even so, “Next” never actually gets to the moment its title names. Life, not death, is the novelist’s subject. There’s a universe of things to say about the first topic, and next to nothing, perhaps nothing at all, to say about the latter. Silence, too, can be eloquent.

“Eating Animals” may be Foer’s first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer’s two critically polarizing novels, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; “Eating Animals” begins with a section titled “Storytelling,” about Foer’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). “The story of her relationship with food,” he writes, “holds all of the other stories that could be told about her.”

The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American — alas, human — and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about “Eating Animals” in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer’s argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman’s column: “It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.”)

I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what’s wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon — and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.

This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It’s an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it’s a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we’re so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force — historically, it’s unprecedented how destructive our farm system is — has taken over America and is starting to take over the world. And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn’t require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It’s not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can’t stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that’s as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don’t live near a farm? I’m sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What’s your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don’t have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of — maybe there’s 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, “Well, I’m either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian.” Those are the only two choices we have. And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don’t act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable — which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they’re things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don’t know why food would be an exception.

How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?

We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we’re raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it’s made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It’s very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor. For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books — anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who’s selling me something. That’s something that’s great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, “If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields.” I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.

This is your first nonfiction book.

Well, it’s my first and my last. I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. It’s not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others? So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn’t really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it’s everything. I mean, if it isn’t the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it’s up there.

Did any specific authors or works influence your book?

Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn’t have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn’t really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn’t include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.

What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It’s a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people’s exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they’re the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it’s still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned. These things are not as shocking and don’t work as well in a video, but they’re something to be concerned with much more because they’re happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It’s the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it’s part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.

You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?

The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical — is it right or isn’t it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. “Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?” That’s how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn’t even matter. The truth is I actually don’t know what I think about that question. What I know is that it’s wrong to do it the way that we’re doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that’s right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that’s bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.

Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she’s an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?



I don’t think she’s read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don’t think she’s going to change. I think she’s past changing. But I’ve had pretty frank conversations with her about what’s right and what’s wrong, and she’ll agree — as will everybody, by the way. There’s not a reader of this interview who will say it’s right to make animals suffer unnecessarily. So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I’ve spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn’t disagree. It’s sad. She said in a very upfront way, “I don’t think about it, I’m not going to think about it.” For someone like my grandmother — frankly, for a lot of people — I don’t really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they’re most able to change. They’re the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn’t.

Can you talk a little bit about America’s obsession with food?

There’s never been a culture that wasn’t obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That’s it. It doesn’t taste good, it’s not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it’s cheap. But the thing is that it’s not cheap. It’s cheap at the cash register, and it’s sold as cheap — that’s the defense for factory farming, “Look, we’re making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist.” But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it’s the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying. And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness — companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that’s so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?

First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it’s 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment. This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we’re not going to support it and we’re done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don’t exist or not to actively engage with them. I’m not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

But it wasn’t until he became a director, Schreiber says, that he started caring about the critics. When I met to talk with him recently in New York, he noticed a local paper as we sat down.

“Oh, it’s a review,” he said darkly, and tossed it out of the way. “I never took things personally as an actor,” he said. “I never took things personally at all, not until I started doing this.”

“This” is his directorial debut, the film version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling novel “Everything Is Illuminated.” Schreiber’s adaptation, which opened Friday, involves an American kid named Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) who travels to the Ukraine to find his grandfather’s hometown and the mysterious woman who saved his life during the Holocaust. A local, Alex (Eugene Hutz), and his own grandfather (Boris Leskin) shuttle Jonathan around the country, acting, respectively, as translator and driver. For the record, their dog (or, in the movie’s parlance, their “officious seeing-eye bitch”) is named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Part of the charm of both the novel and the film is Alex’s bizarre English: “I am dubbed Alex,” he says, and that his grandfather found Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. at “the home for forgetful dogs.”

But beneath the story’s giddy humor is a serious meditation on culture, identity and memory — issues that, Schreiber says, he has personally been grappling with.

How did you end up choosing to adapt “Everything Is Illuminated” for your directorial debut?

My grandfather is an Eastern European immigrant from the Ukraine, and I was very, very close to him, and when he died in 1993 I started to write a lot about him, and eventually I began to develop the idea for a screenplay that was a story about an American who goes back to the Ukraine to find out about his heritage. And the structure of it was a road movie about a guy who gets involved with the mob, falls in love with a prostitute, and they rip him off and he ends up penniless, and that ultimately is what he decides it is to be Ukrainian. So I’m working on this piece and everything is going fine, and … [the New Yorker publishes] a short story submitted by a guy named Jonathan Safran Foer, and it was called “The Very Rigid Search.” It was a story about a road trip of a young man who goes to the Ukraine to find out about his heritage, and particularly his grandfather. And I was kind of blown away by the similarities between our two stories, and I guess what I was most impressed with, which was not as present in my own work, was his definitively Eastern European Jewish survivor sort of humor.

I met [Foer] and we talked about our grandfathers and talked about short-term memory and Eastern European culture … and by the end of the night he agreed to let me adapt his short story, on the condition that I read the novel. He gave me the galleys that night, because the novel was unpublished. And I read the novel and was completely blown away by the quality of his writing, for such a young man to write with such maturity and humor and pathos. And basically it had the structure in place of a road movie, so it was just really a question of mining the novel I had read for the material I felt would be evocative in my structure. I finished the script a month and a half later; a week after that the book was published, and I opened the New York Times and there it was on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. And I realized that I was in for a ride.

So as the novel became clearly popular, did it make things easier for you in terms of getting the film off the ground?

It was a double-edged sword. On one side it made it very easy to set up a deal. Here I was the accidental owner of a very valuable property. And the novel just seemed to grow and grow and grow in popularity. And that made my job easier in terms of setting up the deal. Of course it increased exponentially the pressure and anxiety I felt about adapting a novel that was so beloved by the public.

But also people do have very strong feelings about that book and about Foer himself — they either love him or they hate him.

Yes. I think the biggest anxiety for me in making this film — and it only got exponentially worse as the book became more and more popular and more people read it — but probably the biggest anxiety was the sense of responsibility I felt not only to Jonathan as a writer, but to my own family, because it’s a story that’s personally evocative for them, and of course for Jonathan’s family as well. And that was crippling sometimes, that sense of responsibility and anxiety.

That’s the nature of film: On one side of the coin it’s a pragmatic, brutal kind of physical endeavor — make the day, finish on time, do it with the money you’ve been allotted. And that’s the reality of your day — shoot the scene, pray it doesn’t rain, hope that everything works, try to create an environment in which the actors can do their thing and still deliver the visual text that you’re trying to deliver. You want to be almost emotionless to fulfill that, because it really is like a triathlon. And the more emotion and the more anxiety you feel the harder it is to get through the day. And when something doesn’t go right, or if you think you haven’t got it, to get caught up in the emotionality of “Christ, what’s this going to do to my family? What’s this going to do to Jonathan’s family? What’s this going to do to Jonathan and me?” — that slows you down, stops you, and you just need to keep moving forward, and that was the hardest part.

My emotional responses to things as an actor are very useful, but as a director sometimes not so much.

Did you consult with Foer when writing the screenplay, or did he pretty much just leave you to it?

He read every draft of the script that I wrote. I wanted him to write it with me. I love his writing, he has a truly unique sense of humor, and I had some of that from my own grandfather and it was built into me somewhere, but I just knew there were riches in Jonathan’s brain that I wanted. But he felt pretty adamant that he had done his part, which was the book. But we spent an awful lot of time, before I started, talking about what kind of movies we liked, what kind of things we liked, and we talked about that cultural sense of humor and what it meant in a deeper context. He had been in Europe working on his second novel, and I had been living in Europe as an actor, and we talked a lot about stereotypes and clichés of the American character that we felt were hurtful to us, and part of what we both liked about “Illuminated” so much is that it offered up a different kind of American character, a vulnerable American character, someone who has flaws, someone who was open, someone who was awkward, and more importantly than anything, someone who was looking for his own heritage beyond the borders of his own country.

It seems like it’s much harder to win respect for a movie that’s based on a book, because everyone’s going to compare it to the book, and usually unfavorably. But in this case, I felt like the actors really looked and sounded like my idea of them in the novel. I’ve always thought of Jonathan Safran Foer as somewhat Elijah Wood-ish.

Good, I hope you write that, because I’m very proud of Elijah, and Elijah took a great risk to play this part. It’s a hard part because it’s such a stoic character, and it’s so emotionless, at least at the beginning of the film. And part of the idea was to have somebody who was in a sense an empty vessel that would be filled with information over the course of the journey and then begin to emote. The characters are so vivid, and that’s Jonathan’s talent.

… Part of what makes a good film to me is when I’m transported to some place, and it seems like we had a really unique opportunity here with the Ukraine to take our audience to a place that was unfamiliar to them, which is in a sense what we were doing through our central character, Jonathan. I felt that it was very important that the culture and the characters and the location be as authentic as possible. That and the use of the Russian language — as difficult an idea as that is to deal with, because nobody seems to like subtitled movies these days — it was very important that we were being immersed in a foreign environment and that it was just as strange for us as it was for Jonathan. And to that end, there was no way I was going to use American actors who had to learn Ukrainian or Ukrainian dialects to play these characters.

The movie has nothing if not a deep sense of culture; it’s about a cultural clash between East and West. I was trying to make the film feel more like an Eastern European film than an American film so that we could come down on their side, perhaps — start on our side, and come down on their side. It’s that kind of compassion that I think is evocative of the novel; you get a sense of a really broad sense of humor but at the same time you identify with them as not being really that different from us. And I think that was a real gift from Jonathan as a writer.

I wonder if your experience making remakes — “Hamlet” (2000), “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “The Manchurian Candidate” — may have come in handy with adapting a written work to film. I mean, in both cases, you’re dealing with work that has had a previous life — with the films and plays, other actors who have played these roles, and with the book, there’s the reader’s idea of what the characters look like.

Ah, you jumped on the remake thing, didn’t you?

Yes, I did!

Nice one! You know, approaching a story that’s been done before, you don’t do anything differently. The reality is that I don’t know a story that hasn’t been told before. How famous they are, how much people identify with them, that’s something else. But I think that’s the point of good stories, they have a way of repeating themselves. And if you are sincere about it, if you are personal, in other words you include yourself in the process, chances are other people will feel included because other people identify with you a lot more than you think they do. It’s only when you try to be them, when you try to second-guess how they feel, that you risk missing the mark more often.

Sure, but you still have to make these things your own, and you do seem to have a large amount of experience with that. So how do you specifically do it?

Well, for instance, I have a pathological memory problem, I always have, and I’ve been to doctors about it because it got really serious. At one point I was upstate at my house with my brother, and the telephone rang, and I had no idea where I was. I didn’t even recognize my brother. I walked in the house, and by the time I picked up the phone I knew where I was. So I started going to doctors, I had CAT scans and MRIs, they checked me from head to foot and said there’s nothing wrong with you. And it had happened to me months before when I was in high school, when I was playing football, and I thought it was a concussion. After a play I was lying in the field and thinking, where the hell am I? And after about 30 seconds I was back. They said to me, maybe you should go to therapy. So I went and after talking to this therapist for a period of three months, basically I came away with the conclusion that I just have a terrible memory! I don’t remember my childhood, I don’t remember a lot of things, I have flashes of things, but talking to my friends I’ve found that this isn’t so uncommon.

So for me — now I’m trying to get back to your question — for me, if you believe a human being is a collage or a collection of memory and history, if that’s part of what makes up our personalities and who we are, then you start to freak out a little bit that if you don’t have a memory then you get a bit of an identity crisis. Which is OK if you’re an actor, because every month you get a new script. But when my grandfather died in 1993, I started to panic a little bit that I was losing things that were important to me. And I remember when I turned 34 I looked in the mirror and thought my hair was thinning, and you know how you get your hair from your mother’s father?

Yes.

So I was thinking, was my grandfather bald when he died? And it flipped me out that the person I was closest to in the world, I couldn’t remember if he had a bald spot when he died. And that was the beginning of the process of me writing about him, and that was the beginning of me being very concerned about my memory, and I started to collect things that would remind me of places and people. When I started to work on the movie, I had my assistant take Polaroids of the entire crew, and I would write their names on them because literally in a day I would forget everyone’s name. So that was an element I gave to Jonathan, collecting things and putting them in Ziplock bags and creating this collage of artificial memory. And I think what moved me so much about the novel was that Jonathan was proposing, I felt, or what I interpreted because my big issue is memory, that a past lovingly imagined is as valuable as a past accurately recalled. And that was how I, as a writer and as a director, put my thing in the film.

In terms of acting, an example for me would be Eugene [Hutz], who I think is a fantastic natural performer, incredibly charismatic — but Eugene’s the frontman to a gypsy punk band, Gogol Bordello, and Eugene’s used to playing to 800 to 1,000 people, and his favorite actor is Charles Bronson. So Eugene, having never acted before in front of a camera, had all these ideas of what acting was, and the whole journey for me with Eugene was getting him to accept that he was Alex, and he didn’t need to play Alex, he didn’t need to go to the Yale School of Drama, all he needed to do was to trust who he was and how he would react to things. And then it was just a question of scale — you’re not playing to 800 people, you’re playing to a camera that is 6 inches in front of your face. And once we had that he started to blossom. It was the same thing for every character. Your personal story, which no one knows, is what people are going to identify with. That emotion comes through on camera.

The humor in the book version of “Illuminated” is largely in the language — the goings-on are intensely serious, but then you have this comic voice narrating them. That type of voice-driven story usually adapts terribly to screen, but I liked that you retained lot of the humor by not only having Alex’s voice-over narration, but also by transferring much of the quirkiness into the visual language of the film. For example, in contrasting the old and new Ukraine, you have a scene in which we see two old people sitting on a bench, but then the camera pans up and in the park behind them are all these young skateboarders. I’m sure there must have been directors who influenced those scenes.

I’m glad you noticed that. That was a big deal to me. I drew a lot of [those scenes] from the book, but I also drew a lot of them from my own investigations about culture. I started thinking about making this movie in the fall of 2001, and one of the things I was thinking of was that right after September 11, there was this window of compassion that I felt in this country. Remember when all the people were out on the Westside Highway with the signs? For the first time I felt there was an American identity, a sense of national pride. And I thought, well shit, what does it mean to be American? And because I was working on “Illuminated” I was thinking that, in a sense, this is a country of grandchildren. Then this flag waving started to happen that I thought interrupted this sense of national pride that I was feeling.

I was very happy that we were working on Jonathan’s book because I felt like here was a way that we could embrace culture and in a way that would be bridging cultural gaps and reaching out internationally. So for me it was important to find ways to illustrate that culture effectively. And I guess the models I had in Eastern Europe, because I had never been there before were [Nikita] Mikhalkov, Milos Forman, [Emir] Kusturica, and there was a visual text that I had been learning since I was a kid — what is culture visually to you? You can find examples and metaphors in the buildings, in the landscapes, in the color of people’s teeth, in their fingernails, in their hair. What was so beautiful about Jonathan’s book to me was here was a young person who was interested in old people, which is so rare nowadays. So for me that dialectic of old and new was really powerful, seeing old people and new people together, and old buildings and new buildings. The regrowth. I love that set we found in an old cement factory, where out of the rubble was growing grass and trees, straight out of the building. It’s those kinds of things that articulate a sense of regrowth and rebirth.

I attempted to read “Everything Is Illuminated,” very much wanting to get to the stuff that had so deeply moved so many people. I wanted to catch that mechanical rabbit. It eluded my grasp, but at least Liev Schreiber, in his film version of the book, ultimately — after a number of false starts and hiccups — manages to grab it by the ears.

Which is to say that I still think the book is a stinker. But the material apparently means a great deal to Schreiber, who makes his directorial debut here. Through the first two-thirds of the picture, Schreiber is too respectful of the self-conscious self-absorption of Foer’s style. But by the last third, he’s able to move past it and on to something more vital. “Everything Is Illuminated” is about, among other things, the human need to have some sense of who our forebears were, and to make some connection between who they were and who we are. It’s simpler to write that in words than it is to put it on-screen in a way that isn’t trite or tired, and unfortunately, “Everything Is Illuminated” snaps to life too late. But at least there is life in it. It doesn’t hold together as a piece of filmmaking, but there’s no doubt it comes from somewhere close to Schreiber’s heart.

Instead of attempting to adapt Foer’s sprawl of a novel in its entirety, Schreiber (who also wrote the screenplay) focuses on the portion that appeared in the New Yorker before the book’s publication. He cooks the story down to its essence, with a minimum of frills and curlicues. Elijah Wood plays a character who goes by the name Jonathan Safran Foer, an eccentric Brooklynite who collects bits and pieces of his family’s past — everything from photographs to scraps of cloth — which he places in individual baggies and tacks to his wall. At first we don’t know for sure why he has cultivated this curious habit, but we can guess: He’s afraid, as he reveals later in the movie, that he’ll “forget.”

Jonathan has become obsessed with something he has just learned about his late grandfather, Safran: A mysterious woman helped Safran escape Ukraine in the early 1940s — if it weren’t for her, he’d have been killed when the Nazis wiped out the small town he lived in. So Jonathan, intent on finding the woman, books a trip to Odessa with a two-bit outfit called Heritage Touring, which specializes in putting together trips for rich American Jews intent on unlocking secrets of their families’ past. Upon his arrival in Odessa — wearing a stiff dark suit, brown shoes and enormous spectacles — Jonathan is met by the young man who is to be his translator and guide, Alex (Eugene Hutz), a young Eastern European would-be hipster who favors Adidas track pants, gold chains and Kangol caps, who confesses to being very fond of “the Negro” (especially Michael Jackson), and who mangles the English language freely and often. Sample sentence: “I want you to forgive my speaking of English, Johnfen. I am not so premium with it.”

Along for the ride is Alex’s grandfather (Boris Leskin), who claims to be blind but who’s nonetheless entrusted with driving Alex and Jonathan from Odessa to the obscure location Jonathan is looking for. (Also along for the ride is Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., an alert, high-strung black and white dog who wears a white T-shirt with leg holes cut into it, proclaiming her “Officious Seeing Eye Bitch.”)

If that all sounds rather unbearably whimsical, it is — and Schreiber leaves the whimsy faucet dripping for far too long. Much of “Everything Is Illuminated” is tediously coy. Schreiber overuses some particularly annoying Eastern European oompah music to signal us to the allegedly hilarious absurdity of certain narrative twists, not trusting us to find the humor in this story without musical signposts. He chooses his details carefully but too obsessively: Not once but twice he shows us an old woman’s false teeth soaking in a glass of water, in case we didn’t happen to lock onto the poignancy of the image the first time.

But just when you’re about to give up on the notion of having anything illuminated, Schreiber finds some momentum in the story and — finally — a few crucial elements click into place. Certain characters reveal dark secrets, and Jonathan meets a woman who honors the lives of the townspeople who were so brutally slaughtered. In some ways, she’s his perfect counterpart: She needs to keep the past breathing, just as Jonathan does. She’s a symbolic character, but, unlike Jonathan, at least she’s not a construct.

In the end, it’s easier to feel something for every character here except Jonathan: He’s a dully opaque figure, the sort whose desperate efforts to make us think he’s trying to fade into the woodwork are actually a kind of self-aggrandizement. Wood doesn’t know how to play Jonathan. He shows shreds of off-guard charm in a few scenes, but mostly, he’s impenetrable. (Maybe he didn’t like the book, either.) And maybe the last portion of the movie works better than the rest because Jonathan’s quest is no longer the focal point: We recognize, even if he doesn’t, that other people’s lives matter more than our obsessions do.

In the end, that openheartedness is what Schreiber seems to want us to take away from “Everything Is Illuminated.” He read something that moved him and wanted to pass those feelings along to us. How successful he is at that, as a first-time filmmaker, perhaps matters less than the fact that he had the impulse at all. That impulse isn’t nothing. When he finds good material, it might really turn out to be something.