TJE 7/30 - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

I saw "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" a couple months ago and originally decided not to write a review for it, but since then I've had the nagging feeling that I chickened out. I read so many gleefully negative reviews of "Extremely Loud," that I felt another one would just be redundant. Everyone knew that the star-studded Stephen Daldry adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel was the most obvious, unsubtle kind of Oscar bait that was rightly mocked for being overly maudlin and pretentious, didn't they? But after a whole month of writing reviews I never would have written, it felt right to cap off the experiment with one more that I almost let fall to the wayside. So here we go.

Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is nine years old and very special. He is highly intelligent, inquisitive, and very particular about collecting and cataloging information. His loving parents (Sandra Bullock, Tom Hanks) worry about his myriad phobias and his difficulty in interacting with other people. Oskar's father creates elaborate treasure hunts and adventures to help Oskar break out of his shell. Then his father dies in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and Oskar is left with an unfinished puzzle from his father to complete. Convinced that one last treasure hunt remains unsolved, Oskar takes to the Manhattan streets, meeting many different people and exploring new places. Along the way he picks up a traveling companion, a mute old man (Max von Sydow), who has come to live with Oskar's grandmother (Zoe Caldwell). Eventually they become close enough that Oskar decides to tell him the secret he's been keeping about his father's death.

There are some major problems with the basic concept of "Extremely Loud." The biggest one is the the character of Oskar, who may have Asperger's Syndrome, but the tests came back "inconclusive." The filmmakers use this as an excuse to borrow some behavioral elements from the autism spectrum without having to accurately portray the reality of a kid with the condition. And in doing so, they make Oscar utterly insufferable. He rattles off trivia like a walking encyclopedia, gets away with being rude to strangers, and is generally allowed to be as weird and demanding and inappropriate as he likes while never suffering any particularly adverse consequences for it. Sure, this is a kid in pain who is trying to make sense of the world after the loss of his father, but the elaborate song-and-dance that his family goes through to feed Oskar's delusions gets pretty ridiculous. Thomas Horn is pretty awful too - he mugs shamelessly and draws out the melodramatic bits to the point of tedium - but this is not his fault.

With child actors, the director takes on the greater responsibility for guiding the performance, and Stephen Daldry's been excellent at this before. He directed "Billy Elliot" and helped the difficult young characters in that film come across as genuine and candid. There was none of this manufactured sentiment that feels so awkward and mawkish. 9/11 is still such a delicate topic, that I can't imagine why you'd have a main character who all but requires that the tragedy be addressed in such a heavy-handed manner. Then again, Daldry has built a reputation for himself for helming these ill-considered prestige pictures. You could make some arguments for "The Hours," a deathly dull film about Virginia Woolf and other depressed women. "The Reader," however, was such a by-the-book Nazi memoir, tailored so exactly to the tastes of the Oscar voters, it felt less like a film than a platform for Kate Winslet to make her case for an Oscar statuette.

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" also feels like a totally artificial construct, inhabited by characters that the director wants you to believe are more realistic and relatable than the usual Hollywood types found in slick action movies and rom-coms. Except they're not. Sandra Bullock delivers the performance that comes closest to resembling a real, living human being. Everyone else is playing an utterly flat, utterly devoid collection of traits. John Goodman appears as a friendly doorman. Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright are an African-American couple in crisis. Tom Hanks and Max von Sydow commit no serious cinematic crimes, but neither are they allowed to be full and complete personalities. For a different kind of film, a more stylized or fanciful film, this shallowness of character could have worked, but not in "Extremely Loud," which is dead serious and desperately trying to convince us of its profundity 100% of the time. Instead of something heartfelt and universal, it's just labored and clumsy, and a chore to sit through.

It almost seems like Oskar directed the film, expending all this time and attention on the minutiae and the technical craft. "Extremely Loud" looks gorgeous. It's beautifully shot, the art direction is great, and there are singular moments that do manage a little transcendence. But the heart of the story is buried so deep under all the quirks and distractions that it is impossible to access. Oskar may have found a way to connect in the end, but Stephen Daldry never does.
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