Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

An image of Stephen Daldry wrapping his cold fingers around my neck and choking me into emotional submission pops into my head. "Cry! Cry, dammit," he screams at me, straining to will me into some sort of tear-fuelled breakdown. He is Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. He's making me uncomfortable. He pours syrup down my throat, wants me to swallow it, but I just choke instead. This is awkward. This is awful. This is uncalled for. And he does it all from within the confines of his gooey, goofy movie about a boy and the quest he embarks on to reconnect with his deceased father. This is sappy filmmaking at its most manipulative, its most ridiculous, and eventually its most offensive.

At first, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is just lame, boring, silly, stupid, and a bunch of other adjectives that spell regular doom for a movie. Thomas Horn plays Oskar, a little kid with multiple social aversions and a very healthy relationship with his dad Thomas (played by Tom Hanks). Yeah, that's right. Between these two actors and their characters, there's Thomas, Thomas, and Tom. Bit of a name bias going on here. Too bad Sandra Bullock's mom character isn't named Tommy or something. But anyways, the Toms love each other dearly, but as the sloppily structured screenplay makes clear, their happy moments are a thing of the past, now replaced with a void left by daddy Thomas's recent passing.

Understandably, Oskar responds to his father's death with anger and frustration. Not quite so understandably, he lashes out at his innocent mother and says horrible things to her. But then he finds a mysterious key left behind by his dad and figures that this is an opportunity to reconnect with the man who used to love sending him on elaborate New York City scavenger hunts. Oskar makes a plan to find the lock that the key belongs to and vows to complete his mission at all costs. Given the dearth of clues he has to work with, the search is probably going to take a while. Well, at least he's ambitious. His dad would be proud. Not that I care, though, because Oskar is an irritant and his hunt for the truth is never the least bit enthralling or even slightly entertaining.

Mostly, it's just comprised of scenes where Oskar meets some person and chats with them for a bit, during which he finds out they have problems too. Oooh, how profound. None of the individual stories are particularly interesting and Oskar, as a character, is at a decisive disadvantage due to the stiff limitations of the actor portraying him. Horn is horrible (nice that his name matches that adjective so alliteratively, though), delivering his lines with such stilted affectation that I'm pretty sure that computer that competed on Jeopardy! would provide a more convincingly human performance. (Oddly enough, one of only two of Horn's previous on-camera appearances was during a stint in a Jeopardy! youth tournament, meaning that computer is about as seasoned a performer.)

Avoiding Horn's grating performance is impossible, considering he's omnipresent, narrating the movie (hideously) and hanging around in practically every single scene (horrifically). The movie is all about Oskar and his love for his dad and the whole stupid key plot and while Horn puts in a lot of effort, his performance is simply terrible. The movie's dramatic crux relies on him, which is a really bad idea, because he can't express emotion without making it look as though he's auditioning for a Hallmark movie of the week. Then again, that's pretty much what this is, so uh, mission accomplished? Or maybe that's being unfair to Hallmark movies. Horn really is out of his depth here and Oskar may as well ditch the key hunt in favour of a search for genuine human feeling.

The dreadful lead performance, threateningly forceful directing, and utterly useless plot are significant nails in this movie's coffin, but on their own, they basically amount to a complete piece of crap that could easily be soon forgotten, destined to be swept under a cinematic rug from which no return is granted. But Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close doesn't stop there. It pushes, harder and more cloyingly than ever, in hopes of igniting a passionate spark within all of us. It seeks out a tragic slice of modern history and exploits it disgustingly, deplorably. It turns 9/11 into an egregious exercise in sappy manipulation. Daldry recycles the imagery, sends Alexandre Desplat's score soaring, and then commences his choking plan. He's going to do everything in his power to make us cry, except, you know, earn it.

The inclusion of 9/11 is initially an excuse for clumsy flashbacks that inform us of Thomas's demise in the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers. It allows for tearful goodbyes, close-ups of familiar news footage, and even a very garish shot of the towers as viewed by Bullock's character from an office building a safe distance away. These moments still qualify as unnecessarily treacly, but they're surprisingly brief and merciful in their manipulation. There was a moment during the movie where I thought Daldry and screenwriter Eric Roth (adapting Jonathan Safran Foer's novel of the same name) were actually going to sidestep the darkest, most despicable shades of syrupy sentimentality. But then, with the seemingly endless third act approaching, they take a deep breath and lay it on thick.

Once the floodgates are open, it's an onslaught of 9/11 references that insult and trivialize the tragedy by reducing it to a petty celebration of heartstring tugging nonsense. There's no honest emotion at work here. This is pure sap, flowing forth, doing its best to drown us until we're so desperate for air that we'll accept even this dopey drivel. Seeing how shoddily the 9/11 template is placed over this otherwise generic drama further exposes how empty and pathetic this movie is. It's just dissipating junk without the 9/11 references, but the addition of the tragedy just feels cheap and disrespectful. It's a shortcut to emotion and Daldry apparently has no qualms about making that clear.

Honouring the odd structural decisions made throughout, the events of the movie are recounted in multiple ways somewhere in the jumbled third act. It's as though Daldry figured he must have done such a good job that we'd want to watch a couple sped-up versions from different angles. The story drags on and on, which is especially unproductive when the story has so little to offer right from the start. The mystery of the key has a predictably dull payoff and the movie tries to tie everything together in so bumbling a manner that it's a wonder it makes any sense at all.

At least Daldry decided to cast Max von Sydow as a mute man who joins Oskar on his quest. The veteran actor doesn't have a lot to work with, but he's still the movie's only shining light. Beyond that, there's nothing but defective darkness. What a miserable movie, mistaking forced tears for a real outpouring of emotion. Or maybe it's not mistaking them at all. I'm not so sure Daldry cares, as long as he gets us to cry. But his threats don't work. He wants us to swallow the syrup, but it's not difficult to refuse when a dramatic movie is this inept. No way was Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close going to make me cry! Then again, considering the flat pacing and horrid repetitiveness on display in the third act, I probably would have suffered a nervous breakdown if the movie had dragged on any longer. That would have made Daldry happy. At least then I may have shed a tear.