Post-Modernism: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

963 Words4 Pages
Here’s what sounds like a recipe for offensiveness: a 9/11 movie centered on a scavenger hunt. That’s the unusual template for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, which opens in limited release on Sunday. And most improbably of all, director Stephen Daldry pulls it off, though, of course, not everyone agrees. This adaptation of the Jonathan Safran Foer novel depicts the aftermath of the tragedy from the perspective of a child with Asperger’s syndrome, living in his mind and reflecting his view of the world. That makes the picture both a cinematic anomaly and an unprecedented effort in the world of movies about 9/11, a subject that—as Lewis Beale pointed out in the Los Angeles Times—Hollywood regards warily. Though we’ve seen movies about the events of the day (United 93) and portraits of a New York stricken by its fallout (Margaret), Extremely Loud marks the first filmic treatment of the individual story of one of the 3,000-plus kids left parentless that fall morning. The film embraces the confusion experienced by Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a lonely 9-year-old who lost his dad Thomas (Tom Hanks) in the World Trade Center. Oskar and Thomas used to spend hours discussing vivid imaginary quests to far-away lands, and Thomas sent his son on treasure hunts of sorts around the city. So when Oskar finds a mysterious key in his father’s closet one year after his death, he naturally assumes that it was left there intentionally. A complicated mission to find its lock ensues, much to the perplexed chagrin of Oskar’s distant, grieving mother Linda (Sandra Bullock). Of course, the story takes leaps of logic in its depiction of Oskar’s citywide search for the key’s proper home. With only one clue—the label “Black”—to guide him, the determined youngster makes a point of visiting every New Yorker with that last name, in the hope that someone might provide an answer.
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