It’s a bitch that life can’t be tied up as nicely as a children’s book, but Extremely Loud does its best to distract us into feeling that it can be. And it’s not just Oskar who is supposed to experience childlike wonder and pleasure at the quest in front of him the viewer is meant to be equally swept away, sucked into the maze, finding comfort in the neat arrangement of all loose ends. “I would have to talk to people, which he knew I had a hard time doing.” (The results of Oskar’s earlier Asperger’s syndrome tests were inconclusive, but it seems his father had drawn his own conclusions.)Ī year after the attacks, he sets out for a series of Saturday journeys, on foot, to check with every Black family in the phone book (all 427 of them if need be) and discover what the key unlocks. “Reconnaissance expedition, we called it,” Oskar narrates. He decides it must be part of a treasure hunt devised by his father, who had a yen for that sort of thing. Oskar goes poking through his father’s closet looking for reminders of Thomas and doesn’t just find a mysterious key but also a vase high on a shelf, and inside that is an envelope marked with a single word, “Black,” and inside that is a key. Even his mother (Sandra Bullock, solemn and touching) doesn’t know about the device, which is hidden away on a shelf inside a cupboard capacious enough to accommodate Oskar and his growing collection of fetishized objects relating to his father.Įxtremely Loud is a scrapbooker’s delight, in love with the notion of secrets and hidden objects and beings, carefully layered, all connected. Though he’s only 11, the enterprising Oskar trots out into the night of that terrible day (or “the worst day,” as he calls it) and purchases a duplicate machine so he can keep his father’s last words to himself.
He died, but in his last moments left six messages on his home answering machine. (Tom Hanks), a jeweler and dream dad - playful, wise and engaged in a way that will make 99% of the parents who see this movie feel like lazy scum in contrast - had a meeting at the World Trade Center that September morning. Dodging the twin minefields of preciousness and an exploitative 9/11 premise, Horn races away with the movie and makes it believably, genuinely sad.
The kid is the mainstay of director Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel. “And Unbearably Cute” would work, along with “Deeply Contrived.” But there’s nothing to mock in the performance of Thomas Horn, the young actor who plays the lock-seeking Oskar Schell. Follow Loud & Incredibly Close, which, like Hugo, features a boy with a dead father and an obsession involving a key, has a title practically begging for addenda from critics.
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