Film Review – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

or alternatively the Curious Coincidences of a Boy with a key…..

Rated 12A

Director Steven Daldry

Drama

Mawkish, tear-jerking kitsch predicated on the exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy or a life-affirming journey for a boy locked in a heart of darkness following the death of his father in the World Trade Center? Either way, and one will almost certainly err towards the latter, this is an intelligent and accomplished film from Director, Steven Daldry, whose insightful and sympathetic realisation of the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (screenplay Eric Roth) has enticing twists and intriguing conundrums.

The near perfect father, Thomas Schell (Tom Hanks) leaves his son, Oskar (Thomas Horn, and a most impressive big-screen debut it is) six phone-messages of increasing brevity and heart-rendering dignity as the awful consequence of being isolated over one hundred storeys high in the World Trade Tower become apparent. But Oskar, (and it becomes soon evident his frenetic intelligence is both driven and hindered by his self-aware Asperger’s syndrome), conceals these messages from his grieving mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock).

Oskar discovers a key in an envelope labelled ‘Black’ hidden, he believes, by his father, as part of their unfinished quest to discover the mythical ‘Sixth Borough’ of New York. It becomes further soon evident, if not somewhat pat, that the key is a metaphor for Oskar’s inability to unlock his feelings to his mother about what happened on ‘The Worst Day’. Along the way he adopts the elderly enigmatic elective mute ‘Renter’ (Max Von Sydow) to help him in his search. Clearly, Sydow never utters a word, although his shrugging mannerisms bring painful but warming memories of the dead father. Writing ever more furiously frustrated note-pad messages, he can but watch the self-harming Oskar become increasingly unhinged. Sydow’s performance is a masterpiece of studied economy.

Reconciliation and closure come with an unexpected, but credible denouement (hankies at the ready!) and what we might have feared of mother’s grief being neglectful parent in absentia is cunningly resolved. And, on a personal note, it is manifestly self-evident that the blind-folded morons who spliced together the trailer for this film should be colonically probed with a cattle-prod. It even featured U2s ‘Where The Streets Have No Name’ which is conspicuous in its absence from the film. Ah, I get it, the salutary metaphor of the individual’s isolation juxtaposed with in a seething metropolis of likewise lonely souls. Whatever.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_quK9SEGYE]

Showing in Edinburgh at