When adapting a bestselling book to film directors and screenwriters always run the risk of disappointing the readership they hope to sell tickets to. However, an even greater pitfall, as Director Stephen Daldry should learn, is manipulating a tragic event or staging your adaptation as nothing more than an audiobook with moving pictures. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close could have been a powerful film, but so many things went wrong that it baffles the mind. Nevermind that the story pivots around September 11th and eventually throws it in the audience’s face with manipulative and cloying images of people falling from buildings, the fact that it’s barely a film at all but really just a voiceover by obnoxious child actor Thomas Horn makes having to watch him unnecessary. People would genuinely be better off buying the audiobook and hearing it that way. It’s about 90% the same experience as sitting through the film, and the 10% that separates them is acting you don’t want to see anyways.
Though the doctor supposedly said that Oskar Schell’s (Horn) tests for Asperger Syndrome were inconclusive, it’s clear to everyone around him that he’s a child with emotional problems that run deep. The only person he truly reacts to is his father (Tom Hanks) who harnesses the boy’s energy and curiosity with a made-up quest to divine the fate of New York’s lost sixth borough. When 9/11 strikes, Oskar’s father is on the upper floors of one of the World Trade Center towers and doesn’t make it out alive, leaving a string of messages on the family’s answering machine and a mysterious key labeled with the word “Black” as the last things Oskar has of him. The tragedy drives Oskar into a single-minded quest to find the meaning of the key and, with the help of his mute grandfather (Max von Sydow), begins tracking down everyone in New York City with the surname Black.
The film would be touching were it not for Thomas Horn who plays Oskar as a child impossible not to hate. His rudeness doesn’t feel like that of a petulant child who doesn’t know how to deal with the intense grief that comes from losing one’s father, but rather a nasty spitefulness from a child who was always used to getting their way and suddenly doesn’t have a parent willing to bow to their every whim. Maybe it’s Tom Hanks’s fault for playing the best father ever, seeming at once stern, encouraging, and playful, but the end result is that Horn’s Oskar never seems sad over his father’s loss until a final scene with Jeffrey Wright that pushes the boundaries of good taste in order to elicit some sort of emotional response from the audience.
It wouldn’t need to resort to such reprehensible tricks if Director Stephen Daldry had found a smarter way to tell the story than having Oskar narrate the entire thing with scenes of him running about like a child without any parental figures to guide him breaking up the monotony. As it is, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close barely counts as a film adaptation at all. It’s as if Daldry sat Horn down in front of a microphone and had the boy read it aloud. The rare moments when the narration stops and the characters can tell the story through actions don’t last nearly long enough. Even more sparse are the moments without narration that aren’t ruined by Thomas Horn’s over-the-top precociousness and emotional outbursts. Every second we have to spend with just him, is a second we wish they’d bring Tom Hanks back from the dead or have Max von Sydow reach over and shake him firmly. The character doesn’t have to be an annoying, selfish brat, but that’s what Daldry and Horn gave us. And they gave us a lot of him.
The rest of the cast is great, but there’s far too little time spent with them. Sandra Bullock, as the boy’s mother, is all but absent until a final reveal at the end, and Sydow, though powerfully played, is always overruled by Horn’s inability to tone it down.
"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" opens January 20, 2012 and is rated PG13. Drama. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Written by Eric Roth (screenplay), Jonathan Safran Foer (novel). Starring Max Von Sydow, Sandra Bullock, Tom Hanks, Thomas Horn.
