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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close feels like Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch

Comments (0) By Nick Pinkerton Tuesday, Jan 17 2012

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Director Stephen Daldry has never met a Big Theme he didn't like: After 2002's The Hours, a lugubrious women's-problem picture touching on AIDS and assisted suicide, he went to Auschwitz with 2008's The Reader. Daldry's logical next stop is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which, based on the sophomore novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, provides two global-historical tragedies to play with. Ten-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) has lost his father (Tom Hanks), who was on the 105th floor of one of the twin towers on the morning of 9/11. Almost a year later, Oskar, increasingly estranged from his mother (Sandra Bullock), finds a key in an envelope labeled "Black" among his father's effects and, in an effort to keep open the dialogue with his scavenger-hunt-designing, game-playing dad, concludes that this key was the prompt to a last riddle, which he sets out, at length, to solve. He is joined for a leg of his mission by a mysterious, mute tenant (Max von Sydow) staying in his grandmother's apartment, very likely the grandfather who abandoned Oskar's father. Mr. Schell invented games to bait Oskar out of his anxieties, while Extremely Loud plays its own writerly game of strategic withholding, baiting the audience along on the way to a therapeutic breakthrough for the surviving Schells. Such an abundance of "epiphanies," one after another, amount to a tactical assault on viewer sentiments. The deluge of tears is Mr. Daldry's idea of pathos, but to these eyes, it's Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch.

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DenverNative
DenverNative

Could not agree more, saw this film last week and was bored to tears....seemed like such a long movie.

 
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