The first three-quarters of Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close [2011] set me on the edge — what a cloying movie about an annoying boy who sets out on a contrived adventure around New York to deal with the grief of losing a father to the tragedies of 9/11. Beautifully shot by Chris Menges who brings to Manhattan an uncanny combination of the fantastic and the real, what the film suffers from for the most part is its story. None of it is plausible, and parts of is merely incredible waste of incredible talents — Max von Sydow, John Goodman, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, even Thomas Horn are given roles that are long on the sentimental and short on identifiability. Their characters are like Teflon: Daldry throws all manner of dramatics at them, and they try their best to emote — but nothing sticks. Horn, a talented actor, plays Oskar Schell in an awkwardly written role that makes him a chore to watch. There were moments in the film where I just wanted to go ahead and slap him. I kept reminding myself however that the boy is supposed to be autistic, but if the filmmakers wanted to make his particular social difficultly both real and precocious at the same time, they’ve failed to do so. Instead he becomes very much like a tamer cousin of the monstrous boy in Let’s Talk About Kevin [2011], for some reason. The only saving grace in this movie is Sandra Bullock, who seems lightweight at first but comes to own the last quarter of the movie, dominating its twist ending as a kind of a reward for those who have struggled so far to watch and finish this film. She reminds us again why we love her in the first place, in movies as disarming as While You Were Sleeping. But frankly, this is no Best Picture Oscar material. This is not a commendation on the Oscar’s taste. Then again, its taste never was commendable in the first place.
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The first three-quarters of Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close [2011] set me on the edge — what a cloying movie about an annoying boy who sets out on a contrived adventure around New York to deal with the grief of losing a father to the tragedies of 9/11. Beautifully shot by Chris Menges who brings to Manhattan an uncanny combination of the fantastic and the real, what the film suffers from for the most part is its story. None of it is plausible, and parts of is merely incredible waste of incredible talents — Max von Sydow, John Goodman, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, even Thomas Horn are given roles that are long on the sentimental and short on identifiability. Their characters are like Teflon: Daldry throws all manner of dramatics at them, and they try their best to emote — but nothing sticks. Horn, a talented actor, plays Oskar Schell in an awkwardly written role that makes him a chore to watch. There were moments in the film where I just wanted to go ahead and slap him. I kept reminding myself however that the boy is supposed to be autistic, but if the filmmakers wanted to make his particular social difficultly both real and precocious at the same time, they’ve failed to do so. Instead he becomes very much like a tamer cousin of the monstrous boy in Let’s Talk About Kevin [2011], for some reason. The only saving grace in this movie is Sandra Bullock, who seems lightweight at first but comes to own the last quarter of the movie, dominating its twist ending as a kind of a reward for those who have struggled so far to watch and finish this film. She reminds us again why we love her in the first place, in movies as disarming as While You Were Sleeping. But frankly, this is no Best Picture Oscar material. This is not a commendation on the Oscar’s taste. Then again, its taste never was commendable in the first place.