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

Related Content

• Ballet Up To the Barre
  May 5, 2011
• Now Playing
  May 26, 2011
• Now Playing
  June 2, 2011
• Billy Elliot dances around its shortcomings with Broadway cliches
  May 19, 2011
• The Reader
  December 25, 2008

More About

• Stephen Daldry
• Stephen Daldry
• Oskar Schell
• Movie Stars
• Celebrity News

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

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.