Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the tearjerker movie adaptation of a 2005 novel about a hyper-intelligent young boy dealing with the death of his father in the 9/11 Twin Towers attack.
Newcomer Thomas Horn is 11-year-old Oskar Schell. His father, played by Tom Hanks, had always set up scavenger hunt-style games designed to help Oskar overcome his own social challenges. Despite some very powerful early scenes dealing with Oskar’s own grief, the movie strives to be more plot-driven, so it becomes one of those games—a mission about finding the lock for a mysterious key. The resolution to this mystery is pretty forced and a last-minute revelation from his mother, played by Sandra Bullock, is even more contrived.
The scenes that work the best are the ones with Max Von Sydow, who plays an old man who doesn’t speak. The two make an unlikely pair, but a sense of understanding forms between them about their own guilt. Unfortunately, the young actor feels like he’s just reciting lines half the time. He’s supposed to be filled with terror and anxiety but it comes across as overly confident—and some of the most crucial emotional scenes suffer.
To make things worse, the movie spells its theme out with an exclamation point by having its characters speak it aloud over and over again. If you want to “make sense out of something that doesn’t make sense,” try a movie that’s a little less manipulative.
