Written by Burhan Wazir, New Media, DFI

Film: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Director: Stephen Daldry
Stars: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock
Year: 2012
Running Time: 129 mins

In the decade since the events of September 11, 2001, American film-makers have struggled to dramatise the events of that day. A variety of approaches have been taken, ranging from Oliver Stone’s clarion call to patriotism, “World Trade Center” to the documentary style re-enactment of “United 93”. Like a number of films released about the war in Iraq, all have proved unpopular with the American public. It is easy to conclude why – footage from the day casts a long shadow across TV news and the online media. Viewers don’t need reminding.

Based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”, begins a year after the attacks on New York. Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a lonely but gifted 11-year-old who may have Asperger’s, is clinging to the memory of his father Thomas (Tom Hanks), a jeweler, who died in the World Trade Center. Hanks appears generously in flashback throughout the film, always disclosing a series of life lessons to the young boy. We learn that before he died, Thomas Schell also left six messages on the family answering machine. Oskar has kept the voicemails from his mother Linda (Sandra Bullock) by switching machines.

Searching through his father’s closet one day, Oskar accidentally breaks a blue vase and discovers an envelope marked “Black”, containing a key. Taking a phone book, he decides to look up 472 individuals called “Black” in the New York area – if he can find a lock for the key, he presumes he can find answer to his father’s death.

In less experienced hands, this could all prove to be dangerous territory, but Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”, “The Hours” and “The Reader”), is a confident director, working from a script by Eric Roth. He focuses on Oskar’s mission to connect with his father one last time. The boy, wielding a tambourine and wearing a backpack, sets off to intrude on an array of New Yorkers. Along the way, he encounters a group of religious devotees, horse lovers, Abby Black (Viola Davis), and her soon to be ex-husband William (Jeffrey Wright). Most of them are surprisingly welcoming to a boy who turns up unannounced, bangs on a musical instrument, and proceeds to tell them, in a jumble of grown up sentences, about how he found the key, and how they might provide an answer to his father’s death.

None of this is plausible, of course. And I found “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” took a manipulative approach to Oskar’s grief, despite a moving performance by Horn. With all due respect, how can we feel sympathy for a precocious young boy who sees himself at the centre of the universe? The film takes another wild turn when Oskar, depressed by the scale of the task ahead, looks to his grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) and her live in lodger (Max Von Sydow) for help. The latter, who may be Oskar’s grandfather, refuses to talk and communicates by holding up his palms, on which he has written “Yes” and “No”. For longer conversations, he uses a notepad. At this point, the audience may wish Tom Hanks had imparted one more valuable lesson to his son before he died: sometimes, children should be seen and not heard.