The story unfolds from the inventive mind of eleven-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) after his father (Tom Hanks) dies in the World Trade Center. Longing to continue the games – the sort-of scavenger hunts that he and his father used to play, from “The Worst Day” forward, Oskar looks for answers via a gold key accidentally found in his father’s closet. What does the key go to?
With key in hand, young Oskar crosses the five boroughs to knock door to door, looking for everybody in the phone book under the name “Black”- a point significant to the storyline. It’s at this moment the audience can’t help thinking “Where is Oskar’s
mother and why is she allowing him to do this? What if he too dies?” His mother (Sandra Bullock) is grieving, but takes a path allowing Oskar to continue his delusions to be the “team” he and his dead dad have created. Bullock steps back, so much so, she barely appears in the movie, and certainly hasn’t a knack for nurturing skills when a child might need their mother most. The one scene that seemed authentic is when the child lashes out at her, which is very typical of real life…the parent left
behind (whether in divorce or death) is always the one blamed and hated.
The questions will continue to rise in this disjointed script that settles in during the grieving scenes but then jumps all over the
map (literally) during scenes that director, Stephen Daldry probably thought artistic but turned out ultimately disastrous and exhausting.
As time should heal all wounds, instead we witness our little Okar finger-scratches self-created ones, picking at his arms and chest, analyzing in narration what it’s like to be buried, and then alternating outbursts and tantrums that warrant grief counseling.
When he chooses to bond with the old “renter” (Max von Sydow) in his grandmother’s apartment across the way one hopes the storyline will make a turn for the better. Spoiler alert: Once you discover who this man really is, it only adds more questions
and would-be solutions to an already preposterous storyline.
Any of us can understand the enormity of this situation, the helplessness that might surface when a loved one is gone and nothing is to be done, but the director never allows this to organically sink in. Instead he rips the natural delivery of the
storyline into chopped parts, playing fancy-foot work with the camera, but never in a way that allows us to share the frustration of the lead character. Instead we’re just plain ole frustrated.
Young newcomer actor Thomas Horn does an incredible job of making the film his own, and that’s probably due to Daldry’s history with children (Billy Elliot) but even with Academy winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider) and based on the acclaimed best seller by Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close feels more Extremely Annoying
& Incredibly Disjointed. One and a half tiaras