Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

 

1 1/2 Stars

"Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" transforms the carnage and unruly grief of Sept. 11, 2001, known to its preteen Upper West Side Manhattan protagonist as "The Worst Day," into an occasion for interborough healing and emotional encounters of the cheapest kind.

If actors this good cannot overcome their material, then we can only say: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock ... Max von Sydow, Zoe Caldwell, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman ... thanks for your honest efforts in the service of a fundamentally dishonest weepie.

Played by newcomer Thomas Horn, young Oskar Schell (he's 9 in the novel, 11 in the film) is the character created by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer ("Everything is Illuminated") in his 2005 book, adapted by screenwriter Eric Roth. Oskar lives on an undetermined spot somewhere along the autism spectrum. Father, played by Hanks, is a jeweler, fun-loving and kind-hearted, who never knew his father, a damaged remnant of World War II. Oskar's mother, played by Bullock, must rethink everything she knows about parenting and her future after her husband dies in the World Trade Center attacks.

The movie is a treasure hunt.

Oskar finds a key in a small brown envelope labeled "Black" among his late father's possessions. The boy, who shakes a tambourine to calm himself and who travels with an Israeli gas mask in the wake of 9/11, embarks on a "reconnaissance expedition" in which he contacts every single person named Black in New York's five boroughs. The key, he believes, will unlock some sort of symbolic door to his father's personality, and help explain to Oskar why his father had to die.

Ill-advisedly poetic or adorable conceits litter "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Over and over we return to the image of Hanks, blurry and floating, turning over and over in the sky, as Oskar imagines him jumping to his doom. Oskar serves as informal marriage counselor for not one but two couples. Davis and Wright play a divorcing couple named Black; Caldwell is Oskar's grandmother, with von Sydow cutting through the script's dross as the mute boarder with "yes" written on one hand and "no" on the other.

Devastating loss joins all these lost souls together in a process of traumatic recovery. Oskar's the magic key for an entire island and beyond; his project unites millions, seemingly, in a mass "awwwwwww." Directed with maximum slickness and prettiness by Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot," "The Hours," "The Reader"), the film pushes its adored prince along his path to a better place. After a while, Oskar's fussy, obsessive voice-overs begin to drive you nuts, which becomes a source of guilt (How can I have problems with a character who's suffered so much?). In the most genteel way the film has both its hands around your throat, forcing you to choke up.

Please try to see Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret" instead. Completed years ago and released only fitfully in 2011, Lonergan's picture comes straight out of the mess and chaos of the years following 9/11, and without so much as a single direct reference to that date, it's the post-9/11 movie. Daldry's Manhattan melodrama, by contrast, is too busy trying to make us feel good about feeling bad to say much of value about the hole in any survivor's heart.

 

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