Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Dir. Stephen Daldry (2011)

Is it still too soon for a film about 9/11? That criticism was levied against Paul Greengrass's United 93 when it was released in 2006. In my mind, United 93 was a riveting and emotionally draining experience because it was handled in a realistic and even handed manner. The same cannot be said for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a cloying and overly precious adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 book. The method in which the film tackles its subject matter with such saccharine sentimentalization shouldn't come as a surprise as the screenplay was penned by Eric Roth, who also adapted Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Extremely Loud deals with similar themes to Foer's debut novel, Everything is Illuminated, which was also made into a film by actor/director Liev Schreiber. Both are idiosyncratic works dealing with a protagonist on a journey to learn about themselves and their family. In Illuminated, it was the author himself. In Extremely Loud, it is eleven-year old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn). Oskar's parents had them tested for Asperger's Syndrome, but the results were inconclusive. He has a hard time finding his place in the world and carries a tambourine to soothe his anxieties.

Oskar's father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), seems to be the only one who understands him. He tasks his son with a series of scavenger hunts to assist the boy in interacting with the outside world. Thomas is killed in the terrorist attacks leaving Oskar desperate to find meaning in his death. Oskar's mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock), doesn't have the easy rapport with Oskar her husband did and struggles to cope.

One day, he rifles through his father's belongings and discovers a key inside an envelope marked with the word, "Black." Oskar decides to look up everyone with the last name of Black in the five boroughs believing this is a final message from his late father. Along the way, Oskar gets a sidekick in an elderly mute man (Max von Sydow), who is renting a room from Thomas's mother. Known only as The Renter, he communicates through a notepad and tattoos of the words, "Yes" and "No," on his hands.

Oskar's journey encapsulates New Yorkers from all walks of life and symbolizes the romanticized view of how the city and we as a country came together after the tragedy. For the most part, these scenes feel very contrived and truncated, a meaningful message lost as it is distilled into a series of montages. Very rarely are there moments of genuine emotion. Oskar's visit to the first name on his list is the most powerful sequence in the film, due in no small part to the presence of Viola Davis, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance. In Doubt, Davis was only in one substantial scene opposite Meryl Streep, yet still garnered high praise and an Oscar nomination. She again spins gold out of a minuscule role as Abby Black, a woman in the middle of a messy divorce. Her husband (Jeffrey Wright) is rushing out of the house when Oskar comes to visit.

Wright is also solid in his supporting role as is Max von Sydow as a character that is both cartoonishly eccentric and heartbreakingly bare. As Oskar's parents, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock give fine performances, trading on their reputations for being so likable. Not faring so well is Thomas Horn, a young man discovered through his run on Teen Jeopardy. The entire film hinges on Horn, who's stilted line readings works well in short bursts to accentuate the character's detached nature. However, he is unable to handle large portions of dialogue. This is very problematic due to Oskar's continuous narration throughout the movie, a leftover remnant from the original novel.

No matter how hard they try, there is an aura of crassness that sullies whatever well meaning themes the filmmakers are attempting to portray. How can you not be revolted by the opening sequence featuring close-ups of Tom Hanks's body as plummets through the sky in slow motion? Another shot later on sees Hanks dropping out of the Tower and directly into the camera. In yet another scene, Oskar has printed out pictures from the internet of a body tumbling out of the building. He wonders if that was his father.

Director Stephen Daldry is responsible for three of the worst Best Picture nominees in recent memory, The Hours, The Reader, and now Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Released to coincide with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Extremely Loud feels less like a soothing salve on a gaping wound and more like a band-aid ripped off your arm in the most painful manner.

Rating ** (*****)

The Reader

The Reader - Dir. Stephen Daldry (2008)


The Reader dances a thin line between arthouse drama and softcore porn. Kate Winslet once again bares flesh in this adaptation of the best-selling German novel from The Hours writing/directing team of David Hare and Stephen Daldry.

Young actor David Kross plays Michael Berg, a teenage boy who becomes fixated with Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz, a middle-aged ticket taker. They meet during a rainy day when Michael falls ill outside Hanna’s apartment building. Hanna’s remark, ”Have you always been this weak?” succinctly sets the tone for their relationship. Michael spends the next three months bedridden having been diagnosed with scarlet fever. Healthy once more, Michael visits Hanna’s apartment to bring her flowers as a thank you. He glimpses Hanna getting dressed and putting on her stockings. Caught, he runs away but returns the next day. Michael gets dirty after fetching Hanna coal and she orders him into her tub and returns to dry him. Oh, she’s naked now.

As their illicit affair progresses, Hanna begins asking Michael about his studies. She eventually has Michael read to her, always before sex, never after. He reads Hanna The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, and even Lady Chatterly’s Lover while in the tub together. She finds the latter disgusting, but asks him to continue. The relationship becomes tempestuous as Michael finds himself split between Hanna, his family, and school friends. Before the summer is over, Hanna has disappeared without as much as a word to anyone.

Eight years later, Michael is now studying law and sits in the audience at a war crimes trial. He is shocked to hear Hanna’s name called as one of the defendants. Before they ever met, she was a member of the SS and prison guard at a satellite camp near Auschwitz. He feels both love and revulsion. The film unfolds in a non-linear fashion beginning with a middle-aged Michael in the 1995. His time with Hanna has left a hole in his heart and informed his relationships with other women. Michael is divorced with an estranged daughter. We jump back and forth from Michael’s childhood to adulthood when he later sends an imprisoned Hanna books on tape he recorded himself.

The romance between Michael and Hanna acts a parable to the feelings of the post-WWII generation of Germans trying to come to grips with the horrors of the Holocaust. Anger, guilt, the sins of the father, and all that. The Reader starts off well, but there is an almost mechanical and sterile fashion to the way it treats the subject matter. I haven’t read the novel, yet I can safely guess (as with most adaptations) that a lot of the subtext and added layers were lost in the translation. Even when Michael visits Auschwitz and walks through the barracks, it still feels like too clean like a History Channel reenactment.

Though the storytelling falls short, the acting is strong across the board. Winslet really carries the entire picture on her shoulders. She’s de-glamorized for much of the film and is buried under make-up to play the eighty year-old Hanna. However, Winslet’s performance is much more than a reliance on gimmicks. Ironically, her character is the hardest to read. Like others of her generation, larger circumstances led to her falling in with the Nazi party, but how much she shared with their ideology is never revealed. Nor do we ever fully comprehend her culpability in the deaths of her prisoners. She is the perfect microcosm for the majority of the population during that time. Though she may not have personally killed anyone, she stood by and watched. She went along with it. She was only following orders. Michael too is guilty of remaining silent. He learns of a deep kept secret of Hanna’s, one that would affect the outcome of the trial. He ultimately says nothing out of guilt and, perhaps, as a way to punish Hanna for abruptly leaving him. Ralph Fiennes gives a quiet pain to the older Michael Berg. Fiennes own subdued performance in The Duchess came off cold and cruel, here it’s tormented uncertainty. Maybe that has more to do with context than anything else.

Rating: ** 1/2