Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Review

Over the last 10 years, whether or not a film about one of the darkest days in American history has been up for much debate. The debate has been if it’s too soon to have a film made, but to be honest, flight 93 in 2006 was greatly considered to be too soon. Even though, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was just a novel in 2005, it was criticized for being too soon for being released in 2005. As most novels seem to have this happen to them, the novel was turned into a film, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close went through that same debate is it still too soon? However, if a movie is to be made regardless of what is mention, or where it centers, Hollywood is going to make the film.

            Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has the advantage of a decade-long perspective on the events of that day, and it brings back in a rush of all the pain and sorrow. It transports you 10 years back in your life when the world literally stopped, and everyone was focused on their TV watching the horrific events unfold live in front of them. The film follows a highly intelligent 11-year-old New Yorker, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), whose father Thomas (Tom Hanks), a jeweler who was visiting one of the Twin Towers on 9/11, is killed during the attack. Oskar and his father had a wonderfully close relationship. His bond with his mother (Sandra Bullock) however, is more distant.

            In order to make some kind of sense out of the events of 9/11, Oskar who narrates the movie, sets himself an impossible mission. Discovering a key in an envelope marked “Black” in his father’s closet, he decides to find the lock it opens by tracking down all 472 people named Black listed in all the boroughs of New York. While Most of the time his encounters are brief and dismissive. In a few instances, such as the one involving a woman named Abby (Viola Davis), he finds himself innocently walking in on a domestic crisis. After a while Oskar acquires an ally in his quest, an old man, known only as “the renter” and played by Max von Sydow, who lives down the hall from Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell). This dignified and mysterious gent is mute by choice and everything he says is written down on a notepad. It is Oskar’s strong suspicion that the old man is actually his long-lost grandfather.

            Oskar’s precociousness and obsessiveness is linked to a possible diagnosis of Asperger’s. (“Tests were inconclusive,” he dryly comments in voice-over.) He’s a wearying kid, and Horn – who is himself a prodigy and a champ on the junior edition of “Jeopardy” can be a wearying actor. (It’s his first movie.) He never lets up. No doubt this has a lot to do with the way Stephen Daldry directed him. Still, the film’s title could just as easily apply to Oskar as to 9/11. Hanks and Bullock are wonderful, though their screen time is very brief. But the central dynamic of the film, Oskar’s search for meaning in his father’s death – is obscured by the boy’s frantic odyssey, which quickly takes on a life of its own untethered to 9/11. It is only near the end, when Thomas’s increasingly panicky phone messages from that day are played out, that the film hits home. Grade: A- (Rated PG-13 for emotional thematic material, some disturbing images, and language.)