Fridae

Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) is an eccentric grade schooler whose monstrous intellect and feverish curiosity stems in part from the eccentric education he was given by his would-be scientist turned jeweller father, Thomas (Tom Hanks). As two generations of German-Americans respectively, they live near their Grandma from the old country. Oskar's mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock) is frequently absent and busy, being rather normal compared to this eccentric lot.

This eccentric but happy life is thrown out of balance on The Worst Day. September 11, 2001. Yes, Thomas happens to be on the 107th storey of one of the towers on that fateful day, and within a few seconds, Oskar has lost his father. Months later, feeling his connection with his late father unraveling, Oskar rummages through his father's belongings untouched since that day and finds in a blue vase, a small envelope labelled with the word 'black' and containing a key. Oskar decides to make a list of everyone in New York's Five Boroughs named Black to find who the key's owner could be.

Meanwhile Grandma has a lodger over from the old country, known only as the Renter (Max Von Sydow). He's also eccentric: he doesn't speak a word but scrawls what he wants to say on notepads, and has 'yes' and 'no' written on his palms for questions that require those answers. That does not stop Oskar from befriending the Renter, and soon a very eccentric old man and a very eccentric boy are wandering around New York and pondering why bad things could have happened to a good man like Thomas Schell.

At this point one would rather the protagonists could have just read the Book of Job and discussed it, thereby turning the movie into fellow Oscar Best Picture contender The Tree of Life. The main problem with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is how it gives you three eccentric characters for the price of one hoping that somehow that would soften its attempt at a serio-comic exploration of 9/11 and its after effects. These are those eccentric movie characters that are supposed to be intelligent and serious and thoughtful and lovable, but otherwise come off just plain annoying because they seem to earn too much, work too little and have too much free time. Probably to blame the most is Stephen Daldry's direction of the protagonist as played by Thomas Horn. While Oskar is possibly highly-functioning Autistic, one suspects his eccentricity, abrasiveness and lack of social graces are more the result of being a highly intelligent but deeply spoiled child rather than the cutesy, young Elijah Wood-lookalike idiot savant the film wants you to believe anime-eyed Horn is. Horn is overly intelligent, articulate, theatrical, and says his lines almost like he is reciting them. Because his character is so central to the film, it's sad to say he manages to sideline nearly everyone else around him in his singular obnoxiousness.

It doesn't help that he and other characters make line after line of pseudo-profound observations and musings like wondering if skyscrapers could be built for the dead, whether what makes something worth finding is precisely because it is hard to find, that the presence of a key indicates a lock waiting to be opened, and how people are more like letters than numbers. Eric Roth's screenplay based on Jonathan Safran Foer's novel is buoyed by such observations, as well as a pathetically clumsy overarching metaphor of a sixth borough of New York symbolising the 9/11 dead.

None of these are helped by Alexandre Desplat's uncommonly syrupy and intrusive score that pretty much breaks up the impact of the two effective performances by Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright, and Chris Menges' lush but overly dreamy cinematography serve to alienate rather than invite sympathy from the audience. It takes two hours to arrive at observations that are commonsensical. The result is a movie not unlike going to some poetry recital at a Bohemian cafe and hearing a wealthy preparatory school kid recite poems on the beauty and redemptive value of poverty and suffering.

A story about three supposedly lovable eccentrics who can't seem to identify much for the common man beyond their own self-absorbed little worlds for the price of one is a little too much.