Based on the 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and directed by Stephen Daldry, it stars the newcomer Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell, an 11-year-old New Yorker whose father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), died when one of the twin towers collapsed. The story kicks in with Oskar squirming in the back of a limousine while his mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock), weeps at Thomas’s graveside. They’re burying an empty casket, a dry-eyed Oskar says. He misses his father terribly, but he has his own ritualized way of coping, which includes keeping a secret shrine to Thomas, gazing at photos and mementos, and regularly conjuring his father in flashback.
Expertly abstracted from the novel by Eric Roth, whose wide-ranging screenwriting credits stretch from “Forrest Gump” to “The Insider,” the movie turns on a mystery presented by a key that Oskar finds in an envelope scrawled with a single cryptic word: “black.” With childlike (or a novelist’s) magical thinking, he decides that this must be a message from his father. He also, with a nudge from a locksmith, resolves that “black” is someone’s name and that someone must have known his father. And so, in an effort to hold onto Thomas longer, Oskar packs a knapsack, brings out his therapy tambourine (he plays it to keep anxiety at bay) and goes searching for Mr. or Mrs. Black, a quest that takes him from one corner of New York to the next and into the trembling, gentle embrace of its people.
For a stretch the story follows Oskar as he walks and sometimes runs — among other quirks, he refuses to take public transportation — from one borough to the next, crossing one bridge and racking up untold miles. The unreality of any 11-year-old walking alone from his cosseted life on the Upper West Side to various points in Brooklyn and elsewhere gives the story a somewhat surreal, almost fairy-tale quality. (Later you learn that his travels weren’t exactly the solo voyages they seemed to be.) During his excursions he meets a multi-everything multitude, men and women who greet him with smiles, tears, hugs and prayers, treating Oskar, who claims to have a difficult time talking to people, as a combination father confessor and veritable holy child.
Laden with phobias, curious notions, an extravagant vocabulary, a mannered inclination toward metaphor (he calls Sept. 11 “the worst day,” as he does in the novel) and a possible disorder (there’s a suggestion that he has Asperger’s syndrome), Oskar is himself the key to the story. He’s built to charm from his running mouth to his fast-flying feet, and I suspect that how you react to him — or rather the manipulations of those pulling his strings — will greatly color your view of the movie. In real life he would be one of those children who inspire some adults to coo and cluck while reminding others of how grateful they are to be child-free. This being a movie, however, almost everyone reacts to Oskar with the same warm indulgence.
The near uniformity of these reactions is crucial. The first person Oskar meets on his mission (he’s culled a list of 472 Blacks from city phone books) is Abby Black, a Brooklyn woman who’s crying when she throws open her door to him and who, in a further twist of the emotional knife, is played by that new saint of cinema, Viola Davis. Abby, it turns out, is in the middle of a fight with her husband, William (a fine Jeffrey Wright), who’s racing around the house and pointedly ignoring Oskar. Abby, by contrast, gives Oskar her attention and a photo of an elephant. Mostly, she gives Oskar her tears, which anoint her suffering face and baptize the story as one of universal suffering.
Ms. Davis is such a good actress and such an empathetic screen presence that it’s difficult not to weep along with her, even as you wonder why. Crying is one of the great pleasures of moviegoing, but tears can be cheap. Much depends on your personal triggers, how you respond to having them pulled, who’s working those triggers and for what reason. In some movies a weeping woman is a routine cliché, but when an actress like Ms. Davis cries it can feel very close to home. You may think about your own heartbreaks. And Ms. Davis, a practiced weeper, has herself become a trigger (all those snotty tears she wept in “Doubt”). Max von Sydow, who plays Oskar’s grandfather, if more accurately his sidekick, and who brings natural gravitas to any role, is another.
The images from Sept. 11 of course remain profound triggers for many of us. Some of that day’s most vivid imagery appears in the movie: there are snippets from real television news reports, but there’s also an aestheticized re-creation of a falling man that’s mirrored, with stunning imbecility, by a shot of Oskar joyfully soaring into the air on a swing. There’s also a scene in which Linda, after receiving a call from Thomas, who’s trapped in one of the towers, gazes in horror out her office window at the burning buildings. The shot is obviously composited, but it’s nonetheless a jolt because the buildings reverberate so intensely. It’s this intensity — and our deep emotional responses — that the movie tries to appropriate for itself.
Mr. Daldry, whose earlier films include “The Hours” and “The Reader,” has a gift for soft-pedaling the worst life has to offer. Working with the cinematographer Chris Menges, Mr. Daldry brings a pretty glow to every face and room even during the story’s toughest moments. The performances, including from the reliably appealing Mr. Hanks and Ms. Bullock, are smoothed of any roughness, which can be chalked up to the fact that most of the story is seen through Oskar’s eyes. Mr. Horn, who was 13 when the movie was made, is an attractively real-looking boy with an impish smile and a natural-feeling directness, and he holds his own just fine, even against a scene-stealer like Mr. von Sydow.
But it’s an impossible role in an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can’t bear to face. In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn’t about Sept. 11. It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies — or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers — and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.
“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Images from Sept. 11.
