Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is a film that thrives on weepy-eyed sentimentality, almost to a fault. It has a premise that so naturally provides this that even if the execution of the film had been utterly incompetent, the images recalled and the memories revisited by the premise would nonetheless still hit home and hit hard. As it turns out, the execution here by director Stephen Daldry (“The Reader”) and screenwriter Eric Roth (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) are more than competent, resulting in a film that is cloyingly saccharine but agreeably sweet and dramatically engaging.

The premise is this: Oskar Schell (newcomer Thomas Horn) is an eleven-year-old boy living with his mother (Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”) and father (Tom Hanks, “Larry Crowne”) in a New York apartment. Oskar’s beloved father, a jeweller, is on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre when a plane hits the building on September 11^th, 2001. Oskar’s father dies, having presumably been one of the many who were forced to jump to their death on that fateful day.

A year later, now living with his widowed mother, Oskar searches in his father’s closet and discovers a small envelope sitting inside a blue vase. Inside the envelope is a key, and written on the front of the envelope is the word “Black.” Oskar can’t think what the key could be for or where it could possibly fit, but, having been filled with a sense of adventure by his late father, becomes determined to find out the answer.

And thus we have an adventure on our hands, an adventure through the five boroughs of New York, as well as a possible sixth borough Oskar’s father had previously asked him to find. Oskar tries to fit the mysterious key into every lock he comes across, to no avail. He decides to visit every person with the surname “Black” living in New York. He meets some interesting characters, most notably a woman (Viola Davis, “The Help”) whom Oskar doesn’t seem to notice is going through domestic troubles.

Oskar himself is also a very interesting character. As played with much talent by 14-year-old Horn, Oskar is emotionally cut off and socially inept, much more so than most boys of his age. He has a fear of many everyday things (public transport, elevators and bridges, for starters) and walks the streets of New York shaking a tambourine to comfort himself. We are left to believe that he may have Asperger’s syndrome, although this is never clearly stated in the film. As a main character, Oskar’s emotional blankness is occasionally problematic, but Horn’s performance nonetheless remains captivating and also a very promising start to the young boy’s acting career.

Oskar confides in an unexpected source: the elderly stranger who has recently moved in with his kind and caring grandmother (Zoe Caldwell), who lives opposite Oskar’s apartment building. Known only as the Renter (Max von Sydow, “Minority Report”), this man does not talk, instead communicating through pen and paper. The two quickly befriend each other and decide to tackle Oskar’s ambitious quest together, knocking on doors, ringing doorbells and trying out locks for the key to fit in. At age 83, Sydow turns in a fine supporting performance here that is deep, delightful and emotionally compelling, all done without the slightest utterance of a single syllable.

It would be all too easy to brush “Extremely Loud” aside as nothing more than manipulative Hollywood tosh, which in some ways it is. Unlike many, I don’t believe the film is tastelessly using the real-life tragedy of 9/11 for the sake of cheap and fast emotional resonance; even if it were, surely it should be Jonathan Safran Foer’s original book receiving the blame for that. What I think the film is is a direct and earnest reaction to that horrible event, intended to simply view the event and its aftermath from the POV of a young boy who has lost his father and wants him back; in that sense, it works rather well, but it is nonetheless the case that our heartstrings are yanked on far too often an occasion, which does eventually become slightly irritating.

The real heart of the movie is the father-son relationship, which is moving and convincing, thanks in large part to Horn and Hanks' tremendous performances. Oskar and his father have an uncommonly touching relationship; in his spare time, Oskar’s father prepares wide-scale scavenger hunts for Oskar to go on so that Oskar may build up his social skills and mental abilities by meeting strangers and setting his mind to a challenging task. This helps to heighten the sense of the loss that Oskar experiences when his father is suddenly taken from him; it also helps to make the resulting sentimentality not feel false or forced but earned and heartfelt, we as an audience having grown to care for the character of Oskar’s father.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is as easy to like as it is to dislike; it all depends on one’s tolerance of shameless sap. While it’s overly self-important and contains a few too many teary eyes and trembling lips, Daldry’s fourth feature film is nonetheless a moving and charming melodrama that is handsomely directed, poignantly written and impressively acted. As a post-9/11 drama, it’s no “The 25^th Hour” or “United 93,” but it’s a fine enough film and a successful tear-jerker.

7/10