Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

thomas horn

[recording a message for new voicemail machine] Hi, you've reached the Schell residence. Today is Tuesday, September 11th. Here's today's fact of the day: It is so cold in Yakutia that breath instantly freezes with a crackling sound they call "the whispering of the stars.”

~ Oskar Schell

quick fox: D

sandra bullock

winding dragon

“Where were you when…?” 

Significant events are often remembered with a simple question. My mother’s generation grew up with: “Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?” For my generation, the defining question is: “Where were you when 9/11 happened?”

The answer to that question, for Oskar Schell, is standing in the living room of his New York City apartment, with the TV on, listening to the telephone ringing. 

That’s the simple answer. The truth is far more complicated, and in Stephen Daldry’s (Billy Elliot) adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, the truth reveals itself in the story of a young boy struggling to preserve his father’s memories. 

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) is about a family following the tragic aftermath of 9/11. Nine-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a boy with high-functioning Asperger’s, loses his father (Tom Hanks) in the attacks, causing a major rift between Oskar and his mother (Sandra Bullock) that has not healed a year later. The idea of death is something that causes existential crises in the most brilliant of minds; the shock of mass murder even more so. But especially for Oskar, whose life is dictated by statistical information and compartmentalization, 9/11 brings chaos to an otherwise calculated universe. The only way for him to make sense of it all is to find meaning in his father’s death, which he attempts to do by finding the lock that fits a mysterious key his father left behind.

There’s a strange line between homage and mockery. Films featuring horrific events sometimes tread this line with as much grace as an elephant on a tightrope. Just go online and read up on some criticism on the relationship between Holocaust and Hollywood or any of the opponents against the Boston Marathon bombing film Patriots Day (2016). Do they mean to be insensitive? I certainly hope not. I just think that when one endeavors to accurately describe inhumane events, the resulting production can be decidedly mixed.

It’s a task that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was simply not up to. I applaud its intentions, for it is a film about discovering hope and solace in the face of suffering, but I disprove of its methods. 

Let’s begin at the beginning. The movie opens with a silhouette of a man falling in the sky. The image rips apart into ripped, thin panels to reveal a close-up of the young Oskar Schell. The camera slowly pans out. Oskar stares at the audience. His voice whispers over the image, “There are more people alive now then have died in all of human history. But the number of dead people is increasing.” 

It’s an eerie, unsettling moment. It’s also pointless and condescending. Not only is the first part incorrect, but the second half of the quote puts so much emphasis on an obvious statement that it feels as though Oskar is saying it just to make himself seem more important than the audience. And this level of pretentiousness never yields; if anything, it increases to where I didn’t know if the point of the movie was to give a heartfelt homage to the 9/11 survivors or for the filmmakers to showboat how clever they can be with airy, philosophical dialogue and contrived plotting. 

Do I sound like I’m being a little bit harsh? Yes, and the reason is that I wanted to like this film. I wanted to watch a movie approach the 9/11 victims with the respect and dignity they deserve; instead I felt that the filmmakers treated every single moment of this film as an opportunity to manipulate audience emotions and blackmail their way into Oscar nominations (it’s one of the worst reviewed movies on Rotten Tomatoes to be nominated for Best Picture). 

The major problem is the direction they take with Oskar’s character. The kid is a brat to everyone (derogatory insults, rude and abrasive commands) he meets. I understand that it’s important to keep an open mind about Oskar’s tremendous grief and his Asperger’s, but the issue is that the film depicts him as a high-functioning, highly intelligent kid and someone who is very much aware of when he is being offensive to others.

And that’s where the film’s preeminence to be clever works against it. If Oskar doesn’t have the tendencies to want to outsmart adults or make pretentious voiceover narration, then the argument can be made that his attitude is chalked up to him simply being a kid. However, the film, in its dramatization, expect the audience to hold Oskar to a higher standard than other children, but when done so, the character rings hollow and seems disengaged from the emotional resonance it wants to project. 

As a concept, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close begins from a place of genuine emotion, but in production, the heartfelt messages were overthought and manipulated to the degree that the audience feels more guilt than empathy. 

tom hanks