Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011)

Director Stephen Daldry's new film is about what is probably the most terrible historical event that has occurred in my lifetime, the events of 9/11. He makes the decision not to actually focus on the events as much as he focuses one one family's life after them. A boy named Oskar lost his dad (Tom Hanks) in the attack and is now drifting away from his mother (Sandra Bullock) as he searches for the location of a lock that fits a key he has found in his father's belongings. He is determined that finding the lock will bring closure to his relationship that officially ended a year later. He enlists the help of a few people he meets on the way including The Help star Viola Davis and star of classic Swedish films Max von Sydow. Basically, like all the numerous Holocaust movies before it, including Daldry's own The Reader, we have reached a point of being able to dramatize tragedy by having it in the background of a more conventional and much less moving story.

One of the chief problems I have with the film is the portrayal of Oskar. I am not going to criticize young Thomas Horn in the role as he does relatively well and cannot really be found at fault if his character is seriously annoying. We are introduced to this kid, who is extremely intelligent, supposedly shy despite the fact that he rants on and on to everyone he meets, and who is afraid of little things to an obsessive compulsive extent. Part of the journey he embarks on is overcoming these sillier fears, and it is quite clear he will. This entire film is so sure of itself because of its subject matter and its eventual grasping of hope that it forgets to actually be compelling. The most interesting parts of the film are those involving Sydow who plays a mysterious character who is never given a name and who cannot speak. I would have liked to have known more about him than about this stuck-up little brat that headlines the film. Seriously, at one point Oskar wakes up his mom in the middle of the night to tell her she's a terrible parent and then proceeds to start screaming and breaking things. I didn't feel sorry for him, I was getting pissed off. How is the situation resolved? He tells her he wishes she had died instead, and she believes him. People in the theater were crying, but I suspect they didn't really know why. The film had simply manipulated them to do so.

I do believe that there will be an audience for this movie because people like to watch movies like this that deal with heavy issues in light ways so they can feel like they've seen something important and artistic without actually having to. I do not find that this movie worked on many levels. This is mostly because the main character is so aggravating, but also because of the cheap way 9/11 is used to provoke sentiment. I understand that creating a story around a massive tragedy like this is easy because there were so many people involved you can easily throw a fictional character in there too, but that doesn't make it any less contrived. An inspirational movie should not make viewers look at its most important character falling to his death twice. In the end, I would calmly suggest that viewers look for moving drama elsewhere and that filmmakers leave certain subjects alone. If you must make a movie about such serious matters, do it without the obnoxious child wandering around big cities shaking a tambourine.

6/10