Scavenger hunt comes up empty
Hollywood take on 9/ 11 attacks suffers from a lack of emotion
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE Starring: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock and Max von Sydow Directed by: Stephen Daldry Parental advisory: Coarse language Running time: 130 minutes Rating:
Sept. 11, 2001, changed the world, but lurking in the long shadows of this epic tragedy are personal stories of profound loss. We’ve been told about them, we’ve seen the victims, but every memorial photo tends to feature a grieving family member standing next to the Stars and Stripes — ensuring their private loss loses a human scale, and slides into the frosty realm of political optics.
This is not cynicism. It’s reality, which is why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had such an aura of purpose.
As the first mainstream Hollywood movie to tackle the tragedy of 9/ 11 head- on, this story based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer takes us into the very private world of Oskar Schell ( Thomas Horn), an outsider kid who loses his father on the day Lower Manhattan fell.
Oskar doesn’t understand why his father had to die. He doesn’t understand how to move beyond the loss. Stuck in a scratched groove, Oskar keeps rubbing up against the pain, only to fall back inside it.
Over and over again, we watch this kid with borderline autism attempt to make sense of what happened. But he can’t, leaving the book — and this resulting film adaptation — with a major problem for a major studio movie: There is no closure, nor is there any genuine catharsis.
Hollywood movies have a very hard time navigating ambiguous space with any conviction, so what the filmmakers are forced to do is write their way around the obstacle, and give us the impression of an emotionally satisfying ending.
It doesn’t work. No matter how many shots we see of Sandra Bullock looking concerned, emotionally barren or, by contrast, entirely overwhelmed, the movie fails to deliver anything epic, anything palpably realistic, and, most disappointing, anything remotely satisfying from an emotional perspective.
The whole thing feels contrived and stiff from the moment it opens with the typically dependable Tom Hanks playing dad to Oskar. Director Stephen Daldry ( The Hours) offers up treacle- coated frames of father and son bonding over maps of Manhattan and the other four boroughs.
Thomas Schell ( Hanks) knows his kid has a hard time relating to people, so he designs a mental scavenger hunt for his son to complete by giving him a key, and asking him to find the right lock.
Of course, just as the challenge has been issued, Dad fails to return home. Oskar spends 9/ 11 watching TV, waiting for his mother, and, eventually, listening to the answering machine — and his father’s final messages.
Daldry doesn’t let us hear every message. Like Oskar and the whole narrative arc, we end up in a frustrating loop.
To fill the frames with action, we’re given a repeating motif to hang on to: Oskar sets up meetings with a variety of people, hoping to find out more about his father’s last day, and, he hopes, a clue to the lock question.
He tells his mother he’s on a quest, and, somewhat surprisingly, she indulges him. She lets her young son traipse off into the wilds of Brooklyn and the Bronx by himself, in the hopes he’ll find what he’s looking for.
Daldry doesn’t linger with the pros and cons of her decisionmaking, and this amounts to an emotional deficit, where the mother is concerned. We can see that Oskar is angry with his mom, and he feels cheated that his father had to die, but we’re never given any decent reason as to why.
This estrangement between mother and son not only cheats Bullock out of some meaningful moments, it strips young Oskar of any viewer sympathy.
In short, the kid is irritating. And being forced to follow a high- maintenance, emotionally aloof, and often rude child through the most loaded chapter of recent history is a tall, tall order.
Despite some great acting work from the ensemble, especially Max von Sydow in a silent role, Daldry didn’t really stand a chance at success. The book didn’t succeed as a whole, and, without strong source material, the movie was doomed as an epic homage from the get- go. However, it did stand a chance at private success, from an individual perspective, by pulling the rubble of the twin towers into the Schell living room.
If we cared about Oskar, and his half- present mother Linda, this movie could have been the soulful salve it clearly wanted to be. But the reel never delivers the goods, despite a last- ditch effort in the final tableau.
Besides, while the image of a man falling from the towers has built- in pathos, watching it recreated for the big screen just feels crass, cheap and exploitative — especially when the image is played over and over again in slow motion.
In the end, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close leaves a hole bigger than the pit at ground zero, because it not only fails to memorialize the event with any dignity, it turns heartfelt personal tragedy into Hollywood artifice.