Film Review: Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

A week or so ago I thought it might be a nice exercise to try to see and review all of the Academy Award nominated Best Picture films before tomorrow’s ceremony.  I have now seen all bar Tree Of Life, Hugo and War Horse.  I’m seeing Hugo tomorrow but will probably miss out on the other two.

Tonight I watched the near-universally panned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  And now I am Extremely Baffled and Incredibly Confused.  So confused.  Let me try to make sense of it for you.

Okay.  Deep breath…  Oskar Schell is a possibly autistic, definitely emotionally stunted twelve year old boy.  His hero Thomas Schell is his father, who creates mysteries to be unravelled for his son which are designed to force him outside of his comfort zone, to challenge his compulsive tendencies and to increase his interaction with the general public.  And, despite him being a jeweller, he finds himself at a meeting in the World Trade Centre on the morning of September 11^th.  And he dies.

Oskar finds himself without the one person who seemed to understand him completely.  After some time, he accidentally discovers a hidden key and interprets it as his father’s final mystery.  The only clue he has to work from is a name.  He obsessively tracks down each person bearing that name within the five boroughs of New York City, discovering each has their own personal struggles and unhappiness.

It’s actually sort of a horrible film.  Oskar is painted as a character so viciously single-minded that he becomes difficult to sympathise with.  He is nearly sociopathic in his inability to relate to those he meets during his quest.  And yet, in his grief, this is understandable.  The harder it becomes to solve the puzzle, as he perceives it, the further away his beloved father becomes. 

The major problem is that the main character, of Oskar Schell, is far too complex for any child actor to portray well.  For the most part, Thomas Horn, barely a teenager at the time of filming, does a decent job.  But he is required to be incredibly difficult, nearly sociopathic in his single-minded pursuit of his final quest.  He is fine but, for the most part, the layers required in order to keep his character from being a pain in the arse elude him.  It isn’t until the final fifteen minutes of the film that his character really engages the audience. 

I have seen reviews which call the film exploitative and overly sentimental.  I strongly disagree with this.  As a study in grief about the single most devastating event on US soil in recent memory, it is very powerful.  There is a sequence in which the voicemail messages left by Oskar’s father are interspersed with Oskar’s concurrent movements on the day and this is searing in its simplicity.  In fact, Extremely Loud is rarely a film that goes for the emotional jugular – it isn’t disaster porn and it doesn’t seek the tears of those who watch it.  It isn’t interested in the direct victims or in telling their story – it is interested in telling the story of those who were left behind.  It doesn’t pull any punches in that respect, revealing them to be deeply flawed and troubled individuals.

The strangest thing is that this film seems to become self-aware when it nears the two hour mark because the final scenes seem far too concerned with tying up the loose ends and finding some sort of resolution to the emotional journey and that resolution is far too simply-come-by.

Honestly, I mostly hated it but the final scenes made everything which had come before make at least partial sense.  Grief is difficult and ugly and hard to get your head around.  Unfortunately with this film it goes for the Disney ending over the particularly realistic one and that doesn’t sit well with the film which has gone before.

I really didn’t like this film.  It was sludgy and tough to watch and it tested my patience more than most recent films.  I get where they were going with it and there were some moments of absolute brilliance but they were fleeting at best and ultimately this film was frustrating and unpleasant to watch.