Film review: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

AFTER The Hours and The Reader, Stephen Daldry continues his Oscar-baiting, self-important, relentlessly middlebrow literary-based assault on quality cinema with Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a horribly precious adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11-themed novel about a whimsical boy’s search for meaning in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attacks.

That kid is Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a sort of smart-alecky, autism-y irritant whose panicky existence – he carries an Israeli army gasmask and bangs a tambourine to ward off fear – reaches new levels of precocity after his father (Tom Hanks) is killed when the towers collapse. Jumping back-and-forth in time to show how his dad used to create playful “reconnaissance” missions to help Oskar overcome his general unease with life, the bulk of the film takes place after his dad’s funeral as Oskar embarks on search through New York’s five boroughs to find the lock that will match a key that he’s uncovered amidst his late father’s possessions. As a metaphor for the desperate need to unlock the meaning of that fateful day, that key thing is already a bit too on-the-nose, but it’s rendered even more grating by Oskar’s verbose voice-over, which Daldry and Forest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth pile on in lieu of a more cinematic way to transform Foer’s prose and imagery into compelling drama. At times it’s like watching a slideshow for an audio-book, although that’s perhaps preferable to the moments when Daldry does attempt to translate the horrors of the day into visual poetry via rigorously tasteful shots of bodies falling from the sky and montage scenes featuring tearful strangers reacting warmly to Oskar’s plight.

All of which would be bad enough, but the film takes an even more egregiously infuriating turn when Oskar meets the mute lodger living with his grandmother across the street. Played by Max von Sydow, he begins to accompany Oskar on the later stages of his quest as Oskar begins homing in on the possible sources of the key. Alas, while von Sydow’s haunted visage is milked for all its worth by a film in desperate need of genuine gravitas (at least beyond that which Daldry clearly presumes is automatically conferred upon any film associated with the 9/11 attacks), his quirky character traits – an exasperated silent glower; the words “yes” and “no” scrawled on his palms – reduce him at times to little more than a goofy sidekick. Mostly, though, he’s a traumatised sounding board for the equally traumatised Oskar, a conduit through which generations of pain and suffering can be conflated and equated to justify the film’s big gooey cathartic money-shot in which Oskar plays back a succession of answering machine messages from his dead dad that he’s been hoarding like domestic black box data. Designed to provoke maximum tear welling, the effect is more like the photo of the crying elephant that Oskar at one point explains must have been manipulated using Photoshop: false and cheap.

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (12A) 1star

Directed by: Stephen Daldry

Starring: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Thomas Horn, Max von Sydow, John Goodman

Rating: *