Stephen Daldry's preposterous adaptation of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel belittles the impact of 9/11
A meaty whiff of phoney-baloney rises from this extremely contrived and incredibly preposterous movie, a mawkish, precious and bizarre fantasy of emotional pain. It is adapted by Eric Roth from the bestselling novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, about a hyper-intelligent, hyperactive 11-year-old boy who is on a mission to discover a secret about his beloved dad, killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Thomas Horn plays Oskar, who speaks throughout in the teeny-tiny quiet little voice pioneered by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. Tom Hanks is the bespectacled, saintly father who cheerfully encouraged his son's precocious interests in science, nature and exploring; his uncomplicated personality is witnessed in flashback. Sandra Bullock plays the quietly devastated mom, keeping it together.
Oskar is haunted by the desperate phone messages his father left on the answering machine in their New York apartment as he was stuck up there in the World Trade Centre on that terrible day; he converts his anguish into a fanatical obsession with a mysterious key in an envelope with the surname "Black" that he discovers in his late father's closet. He goes on a colossally strenuous quest to track down everyone in the New York phone book with the surname Black, to ask them if they have a lock that this key fits, to write down their responses, and to uncover some final crucial secret that will somehow resolve his pain. Oskar takes along with him a mysterious old mute guy played by Max von Sydow, a tenant of his grandmother's – a man whose backstory, manners and character are as tiresomely unconvincing as everything else in the film. The poor child's task is exhausting and apparently futile as he goes around asking questions, taking photos and writing stuff down but, of course, his journey generates a redemptive vernacular archive of New Yorkers' experiences. ("So many of them had lost somebody or something, mom!")
Oskar's elaborately dysfunctional mannerisms are a way of allowing the drama to tackle, head-on, the day-to-day pain of 9/11 bereavement, with a quasi-adult observational acuity and a child's energy and tactlessness, but avoiding the danger of being capsized by all the emotional and intellectual implications. But the film declines to confirm whether Oskar specifically suffers from autism or Asperger's; it's revealed that "tests" were carried out on him, but that they were not "definitive".
You could well be struck by the resemblances to Martin Scorsese's Hugo, also about a key and a father figure. I found myself thinking how much it resembled the humorous and consciously absurd vision of Michel Gondry, only quite without the humour and the conscious absurdity. Gondry often evokes the same elaborate, homemade worlds of lonely boys, but the physical impossibility, or at any rate implausibility, of what they are making is an important comic effect: tiny granules of audience incredulity are part of the recipe. Here, we are not supposed to be sceptically amused by Oskar's handiwork and quixotic determination, but very clearly awestruck and humbled and emotionally exalted. Oskar, on his weekends, and presumably with chores and homework to take care of, has somehow had the time and energy to journey across the five boroughs of New York and talk to all these people, and create all these little maps and models.
The poor child is desperate to make sense of this menacing, bewildering world. At the end of her tether, his mother yells at him: "Not everything makes sense! I don't know why a man flew a plane into a building!" Now, she may well already have sat Oskar down and talked to him seriously about the reasons for 9/11. He is clearly smart enough to understand. Or she may consider the 9/11 attacks meaningless, and there is a respectable argument that they were rooted far more in malign psychological anarchy and pure hate than in activism for any clear cause. But the unhappy effect is further to surround 9/11 with a wilfully obtuse and depoliticised adult-infantilism and self-absorption. The film offers a historical perspective with a reference to the destruction of Dresden – where Oskar's grandparents are supposed to be from – but this history is evoked in just the same shallow and incurious way.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close looks on screen not unlike those sugary family-drama bestsellers by Nicholas Sparks, like Message in a Bottle and The Notebook, stories that turn on glutinously sentimental messages from a lost beloved who turns out to be not so lost after all.
There is just one moment here that resembles real life: when Oskar angrily turns on his mother and tells her he wishes it was her, and not his dad, who was killed on "the worst day". That moment of pain is hurriedly smoothed away, but it is a flash of something that an actual human being might say to another, and very different from anything else in this intensely self-conscious movie that contrives to make the human cost and human meaning of 9/11 distant and faint.
Rating: 1/5
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