Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

For those planning the film adaptation, Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close must have been a tough nut to crack. While there’s a human story with a great deal of potential at its center, the way it’s told would seem to be incredibly uncinematic. It’s all over the place chronologically, the point of view occasionally changes, and Foer sometimes devotes entire pages to a single word or image. The result was admittedly sloppy but still pretty darn powerful when it wanted to be. When I read it back in high school, I knew that if the right decisions were made it could make a great movie. I also knew that if the wrong decisions were made it could be pretty darn insufferable. Unfortunately, Stephen Daldry’s adaptation is the latter. He chooses to stay faithful to the novel’s worst aspects, play up the preciousness to a headache-inducing degree, and—most unforgivably—not treat the subject of 9/11 seriously enough. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has incredible potential, but too often Daldry chooses to stick our noses in the misery and call it entertainment.

The film follows the adventures of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a quirky 10-year-old in New York City whose father Thomas (Tom Hanks) decided to take a meeting in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, and was killed in the attacks. In the aftermath, Oskar finds a key that appears to belong to someone named “Black.” Thinking it’s a mystery his father left behind, Oskar resolves to visit everyone named “Black” in the New York City area, all behind the back of his mother (Sandra Bullock). None of them appear to be of any help, but everyone appears wholly receptive to his story. Eventually, a mysterious and mute old man (Max Von Sydow) decides to tag along with Oskar in his quest for resolution.

It’s one thing to tell the story of 9/11 through the eyes of a 10-year-old when you’re simply writing a book. When you’re portraying it visually, it’s a whole other task, and if you’re not careful it can become downright distasteful. In reality, 9/11 was an ugly day, but you wouldn’t know that based on what Daldry shows us. Alas, he is so focused on making everything so beautiful and “moving” that he seems to forget that he’s dealing with an actual event that actually killed thousands of actual people; the families of which are still alive and haunted by that day. Several moments show a startling lack of judgment, including the recurring image of a body falling from the one of the Towers in slow motion. (This image was in the book as well, but we were never supposed to be quite this hypnotized by it. It just sat there on the page.) The film’s dubious motives are made clearer by Alexandre Desplat’s score, which spends two hours simply playing the highest possible notes on the piano. Some subjects aren’t meant to be explored in so twee a fashion.

There’s also the matter of Oskar’s various quirks, which ring hollow when played out onscreen by actual people. He has a habit of calling 9/11 “The Worst Day,” and at no point does it sound like something that would come out of the mouth of a real human being, no matter how strange. Like much else, it seems willed into place by Eric Roth’s mostly uninspired screenplay. (He doesn’t adapt the novel so much as he writes out a broad, faithful-to-a-fault outline for Daldry to have his way with.)  There’s also the matter of the tambourine that Oskar carries around and is constantly shaking. On paper, you don’t actually hear it for two hours. On the screen, it’s like water dripping from a faucet you can’t turn off. Somewhere along the line, somebody in the production has to realize when something doesn’t translate well from one medium to the next. If you don’t make those changes, you’re screwed.

The cast, by and large, is perfectly fine. Horn himself is actually quite impressive, and whenever I was annoyed with him it was more the character than the performance. (Oskar is meant to be occasionally irritating, but it backfires more often than not here.) Hanks is charming as always in the screen time he has, but besides that no one really gets a whole lot to do. Bullock is asked to simply sit around and look concerned while her son runs around the city by himself, and most of the other secondary characters are meant to serve one writerly purpose then send Oskar on his merry way. John Goodman also gets a few scenes as the doorman of Oskar’s apartment building, but I wish we got to see more of him.

About halfway through Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar delivers a summary of his adventure so far that devolves into a montage that evokes (not positively) a similar sequence in Spike Lee’s 25^th Hour. In fact, there are quite a few comparisons to be made between that film and this one. Extremely Loud had an opportunity to accomplish something similar to Lee’s film, albeit on a more accessible scale. Instead it fails, and when Oskar’s breathless diatribe comes it feels completely unearned. In 25^th Hour, you could feel that Lee’s New York City was rebuilding from a travesty. 9/11 was in the background of every scene, but Lee never felt the urge to hop onscreen, jump up and down and alert you to the subtext. Extremely Loud inappropriately uses the tragedy as a device. It does not treat its subject with any real gravity, and instead provides you with an image of the Twin Towers every once in a while to remind you why you should care about all this. It’s all an excuse to get to the next moment of unearned sentiment, of which there are many.

Grade: C-