Chances are you’ve already made up your mind about whether or not you’ll see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Like so many films framing fictional tales around real-life tragedies past, it could be argued a movie centered around the events of Sept. 11 is going to be at best a tacky melodrama and at worst an exploitative venture that cashes in on very real sorrow and the deaths of 3,000 innocent people.
In this case, the movie is based off the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated), who, coincidentally, like director Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours), has a previous work rooted in another sorrowful bit of history — the Holocaust.
ELIC is a tale (heavily) narrated by 10-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), whose father (Tom Hanks) died on “the worst day.” (Though narration is the go-to easy-way out for working the best parts of a book into a film adaptation, it's hard to fault Daldry for the tactic when faced with a collection of words as potent as Foer's) Desperately attempting to make sense of his father’s death and coping with the expanding gulf of time separating him from the memory of his father, Oskar embarks on a nearly impossible quest to unlock the meaning of a key left behind by his father and a lost and mostly forgotten sixth borough of New York.
Continued after the jump.
In this case, the movie is based off the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated), who, coincidentally, like director Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours), has a previous work rooted in another sorrowful bit of history — the Holocaust.
ELIC is a tale (heavily) narrated by 10-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), whose father (Tom Hanks) died on “the worst day.” (Though narration is the go-to easy-way out for working the best parts of a book into a film adaptation, it's hard to fault Daldry for the tactic when faced with a collection of words as potent as Foer's) Desperately attempting to make sense of his father’s death and coping with the expanding gulf of time separating him from the memory of his father, Oskar embarks on a nearly impossible quest to unlock the meaning of a key left behind by his father and a lost and mostly forgotten sixth borough of New York.
Continued after the jump.
There’s little about ELIC that should interest me. I’ve had more than my share of 9/11 films, and I can hardly stomach Sandra Bullock or child actors in dramas, but my skepticism began to fade as Oskar’s journey unfolds. By the time we meet The Renter, a mute elderly man marvelously played by Max von Sydow, I gave up on feeling above ELIC’s blatant tearjerkery, falling for Oskar’s awkwardness and Aspergerian attempts to map and chart his way through the sadness.
Beyond the occasional cheap ploys to cue the waterworks, which, judging from the sounds of sniffling in my screening, were largely effective, and the fleeting feeling there’s not much to the story, ELIC delivers some genuinely wonderful, raw and sad moments, beautiful visuals of heartbreak as we jump back and forth through time — before, during and after the day.
Oskar obsesses over a photo from the newspaper, wanting to see his father in the pixelated picture of a man falling from the towers and pours over his father’s final words. Silently, the Renter pleads for the boy to stop, saying it’s too painful. It would be understandable for audiences to feel the same way or to take issue with someone repackaging our agony into a 120-minute nasal decongestant strategically released just in time for a different Oscar, but ELIC somehow never feels intentionally exploitative.
We end up, kind of obviously, seeing how the sorrow of the day turned strangers into neighbors and with as life-affirming a message as we could hope to take away from a film based on senseless death and chaos. That's not enough to change the way you remember Sept. 11, but it's probably enough to earn ELIC a couple of gold statues come February.
--Eric Pulsifer
Beyond the occasional cheap ploys to cue the waterworks, which, judging from the sounds of sniffling in my screening, were largely effective, and the fleeting feeling there’s not much to the story, ELIC delivers some genuinely wonderful, raw and sad moments, beautiful visuals of heartbreak as we jump back and forth through time — before, during and after the day.
Oskar obsesses over a photo from the newspaper, wanting to see his father in the pixelated picture of a man falling from the towers and pours over his father’s final words. Silently, the Renter pleads for the boy to stop, saying it’s too painful. It would be understandable for audiences to feel the same way or to take issue with someone repackaging our agony into a 120-minute nasal decongestant strategically released just in time for a different Oscar, but ELIC somehow never feels intentionally exploitative.
We end up, kind of obviously, seeing how the sorrow of the day turned strangers into neighbors and with as life-affirming a message as we could hope to take away from a film based on senseless death and chaos. That's not enough to change the way you remember Sept. 11, but it's probably enough to earn ELIC a couple of gold statues come February.
--Eric Pulsifer
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