Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/feb/19/extremely-loud-incredibly-close-review

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In 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were an unloved New York landmark that became overnight a palpable absence on the skyline and a complex emblem for our tormented times. In his distinguished book Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, published in December of that year, architect and film-maker James Sanders called them "that most overbearing symbol of the new city": he was discussing their unlovely role in Three Days of the Condor (the film's villain, the CIA, had its headquarters there), and in the 1976 version of King Kong.

The book was in proof the week of 9/11 and Sanders considered removing these opprobrious references, but wisely decided this would distort the way Manhattan was perceived by both himself and his readers. Others reacted more precipitately, and film-makers cut shots of the towers from movies in post-production, often at considerable expense, and digitally removed them from films made years before. It was as if merely to exhibit them constituted some kind of moral offence.

Gradually the situation changed. First we had Oliver Stone's sturdily patriotic World Trade Center celebrating the police and firefighters involved in the rescue operations. Then came Paul Greengrass's United 93, about the passengers of the United Airlines flight who confronted the hijackers, and the romantic drama Remember Me that ends with a rebellious Robert Pattinson being blown up by Flight 11 hitting the North Tower where he's preparing for a reconciliation in his multimillionaire father's boardroom.

Last December, when Kenneth Lonergan's remarkable Margaret appeared, this long-delayed picture set in an edgy 2005 New York was widely identified as a "post-9/11 movie" as if this were a specific category of American film. Now we have an ambitious, handsomely mounted film version of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, adapted by Eric Roth, whose screenplays include Forrest Gump, and directed by Stephen Daldry, the British stage director who moved into the cinema with Billy Elliot.

The narrator of Extremely Loud…, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), aged nine in the book, 11 in the film, is a prodigiously intelligent, solemnly serious New Yorker, a pacifist, a vegan, a technical whizz kid, and articulate in a manner that would have Peter Mark Roget applauding. His father, Tom (Tom Hanks), is a scientist who turned to selling jewellery as a way of giving his family a good life, and died on the morning of 11 September 2001 on a business visit to the twin towers, an event always referred to by Oskar as "the worst day".

In flashbacks we learn that Tom has raised Oskar in an atmosphere of Socratic inquiry, setting him mental tasks that will make him examine the world around him and cure him of all fears. This playful education has made Oskar obsessive and something of a loner, and early on he refers to the possibility of suffering from Asperger's syndrome. The name Oskar is presumably a homage to that other mentally troubled witness to history, the hero of The Tin Drum, and directs us to larger meanings. Like Günter Grass's Oskar, Foer's narrator always carries an instrument with him, in his case a tambourine, which is designed to lighten his spirits.

The film's initial premise is quite engaging and interestingly mysterious. A year after 9/11, Oskar discovers among his father's possessions a blue vase containing a key in an envelope that bears the single word "Black". It triggers off a search around the five boroughs of New York for all the people called Black to see who might have known his father and why. This produces another of Oskar's copious dossiers documenting the places he visits and the people he meets.

He conceals this journey of discovery from his mother (Sandra Bullock), or he thinks he does, and eventually he recruits as an accomplice his long-lost grandfather, an elderly, shabbily dressed recluse. Played with characteristic authority and a much needed dash of wry humour by Max von Sydow, this German-born grandfather has seemingly lost, or abandoned, his powers of speech as a consequence of enduring the bombing of Dresden in 1945. He looks like an aged Tintin and communicates by immaculately written notes in capital letters and the words "Yes" and "No" tattooed on the palms of his hands.

Intended to plumb the city and discover patterns of universal experience, the search gets nowhere and only drills wells of salty tears and treacly sentimentality. The plot in fact fits into a Hollywood tradition of pictures about sons and fathers or surrogate fathers, where hurdle races are set up to test manhood and pass on life lessons. Inevitably we think of the bogus Forrest Gump (impersonated by Hanks in an Oscar-winning performance) and his cracker-barrel wisdom; of Coupe de Ville, where a father lures his three alienated sons into emotional bonding by making them drive across America; and of the embarrassing Pay it Forward, in which social science teacher Kevin Spacey challenges his pupils, among them the 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment, to "think of an idea to change the world – and then try to put it into practice".

From early on, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close reveals itself as a hollow, calculated, manipulative film. It uses the events of 9/11 not as a narrative armature on which to build a structure of ideas relating to an important juncture in modern politics and culture, but as a trapeze on which to perform pleasing emotional displays. Smug and whimsical, its revelations are factitious, its comments on relationships shallow. It is not the fault of Thomas Horn that by the end of the movie you feel like throwing Oskar's tambourine in the East River and sending him off to swap written messages in silence with his grandfather.