"Extremely Loud..." is one of those pedigree projects that's intended to be Oscar bait, and we know now that with only two nominations and a slew of mediocre reviews, it's fallen short of that goal. Adapted from Jonathan Safron Foer's excellent 2005 novel by one of Hollywood's premiere adapters, Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"), the film is loaded with star power and built-in emotional anguish. And regardless of its inability to live up to its lofty hype, it is still a good movie.
The story centers around a young boy named Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) who, a year after his father dies in the attacks on the World Trade Center, finds the strength to go into his father's closet for the first time since his death and look around. His father (played sincerely by Tom Hanks) would always set up elaborate intellectual adventures for the borderline-autistic Oskar, and had even come close to convincing the boy that there was once a sixth borough in New York. The need to prove this as fact had become a bit of an obsession for Oskar.
While in his father's closet, Oskar performs a blind hand sweep of a high shelf and accidentally knocks a blue vase to the ground, which shatters to reveal a small envelope labeled "Black" which contains a single key. Convinced that the key is a clue in another of his dad's "expeditions," Oskar sets out to find its owner, devising a complex system for locating and visiting all residents of the known five boroughs with the last name of Black.
We know, of course, that Oskar's mission is an all but hopeless one, but as they say, it's the journey, not the destination. And so Oskar meets everyone from a woman about to become a divorcee (the sublime Viola Davis) to a deeply religious woman who prays for Oskar that he will get his answers. Along the way, Oskar disobeys his grandmother by fraternizing with a mysterious man renting one of his grandmother's apartments. The man (played by Oscar-nominated film legend Max Von Sydow) is mute, perhaps voluntarily as a result of a personal tragedy from his own youth. This man, known only as "the Renter," begins to accompany Oskar on his travels for reasons unbeknownst to the audience, at least at first.
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" is director Stephen Daldry's fourth feature film and will probably be seen as his weakest to date if for no other reason than the fact that he received Best Picture and/or Best Director nominations for all three of his previous films: "Billy Elliot," "The Hours" and "The Reader." Receiving a nomination for Picture but not Director, then, is the same kind of disappointment as when Michael Jackson sold only eight million copies of "Bad" after the success of "Thriller." But his work here is, frankly, on par in many ways with each of his previous and also excellent films.
Daldry continues to grow as an artist, symbolically alternating here between intimate close-ups and claustrophobic, tightly-framed moments with the vast expanses illustrated by extreme long shots of New York City. In so doing, he gives us the means to connect with the film on an intensely emotional level and shows us how Oskar is wont to zoom in on the little details of life, while conversely demonstrating the magnitude of the task Oksar sets before himself, the ironic hopelessness and hugeness of it.
Thomas Horn is excellent as Oskar. I've read some reviews that say that he was an annoying kid and hard to sympathize with. I disagree completely. His behavior is carefully guided by Daldry's direction to not only make us feel compassion for the boy but to also grow in our love for Oskar's father, Thomas, and our sadness over the loss of a man who knew what to do to engage a brain as unusual as his son's. Keep in mind that Daldry has already finessed amazing work out of young actors in "Billy Elliot" and "The Reader"; I'd say he's developing something of a reputation as a go-to guy for working with child actors.
The support cast in "Extremely Loud..." is fantastic, particularly the work of Sandra Bullock as Oskar's mother and Jeffrey Wright as the ex-husband of Viola Davis' character. But the eye and soul-catching work goes to Von Sydow, and now I can understand why he was nominated for an Academy Award. In a year when silent film work is receiving so much attention - thanks to "The Artist" - here we have a completely silent performance (unlike "The Artist," by the way) that speaks volumes. Slightly hunched over and dressed in black, Von Sydow's mysterious character is red around the eyes and slouching. His presence in the apartment he's renting and Oskar's grandmother's warnings to leave him alone are juicy plot mysteries for the audience to solve, but the film draws up few questions larger than exactly why the Renter has any interest in Oskar's expedition.
In the performances of Horn and Von Sydow, the film constructs a fascinating juxtaposition; both the old man and the boy are mired in family tragedy and one copes by no longer speaking while the other copes by speaking a great deal. The fact that their pain feels so shared gives the film as much of its emotional punch as the handiness of a Sept. 11 plot to extract tears.
I'm not sure if it's because I had already read the novel, but one thing that surprised me about watching "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" is the fact that I never did get emotionally overwhelmed. I expected to. Maybe I even hoped to. But while I was genuinely moved, I was never overwhelmed, and it's too soon as I write this to put my finger on exactly why that is the case. Indeed, I was missing some of the imagination and depth of Foer's writing voice in the translation from page to screen, but Roth and Daldry try hard to include much of it, and since I read the novel when it was first released, enough time had gone by that I'd forgotten many of the plot's smaller details.
There's definitely a "Forrest Gump" quality to "Extremely Loud...," and I suspect that this irony-free, overly-sincere approach to a still-tender subject will turn some viewers off; they'll consider the film treacly and the emotion forced. But while I wasn't fully overwhelmed here, I was deeply invested in a quality film. It's not the year's best and it's probably not Daldry's best, either, but it's a beautiful, touching movie.
3.0 out of 4
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