Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close | Film review

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is the “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” of cloying award-season hopefuls—the sort of aftermath-of-9/11 tearjerker one would expect from the filmmaker behind The Reader and the screenwriter of Forrest Gump. The film actually begins just like Gump, with an airborne object floating gently in the wind. Except that object isn’t a feather, but Tom Hanks himself, plummeting from the highest reaches of the burning twin towers. This tasteless slow-motion ballet epitomizes the movie’s noxious mixture of whimsy and bombast.

Taken from Jonathan Safran Foer’s contentious 2005 best-seller, the plot suggests Hugo gone Hallmark. Having lost his father on the “worst day”—Hanks occupies the part in flashbacks—precocious, vaguely Aspergian Oskar (Thomas Horn, as shrill as child actors come) clings to the key without a lock that his dead dad left behind. This mysterious memento sends the boy on a scavenger hunt through the streets of Manhattan, often alone, sometimes accompanied by a mute, elderly neighbor (Max von Sydow, robbed of his glorious baritone). The film seems to fancy itself a tribute to a bleeding New York, except director Stephen Daldry has no feel for the textures of the city, and only a passing interest in the eccentric urbanites he pretends to be celebrating. Designed not to aid in any healing processes but to wring every last ounce of sentiment from a national tragedy, Extremely Loud remembers a worst day indeed: the one in which “never forget” changed from a moral imperative to a sales pitch.