EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is as cumbersome a filmmaking effort as the title itself.  The story, such as it is, centers on a boy who has lost his father in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  For some unexplained reason, the boy becomes convinced that his father has left him some kind of final message somewhere in the city.  How the father would have known he was about to die and thus feel compelled to leave his son some kind of cryptic puzzle is, like so many other aspects of this movie, never explained.  The boy (again inexplicably) decides to wait a year before embarking on this journey.  He finds a key inside a vase (much is made of the vase’s dropping and falling, as if this is somehow crucial to the story line; it isn’t) and convinces himself that he must find the lock that the key fits.

The packet containing the key contains the name “Black” and so our little hero embarks on a campaign to look up all the people of that last name in the phone book, all 472 of them.  While the movie mercifully does not show every single confrontation, there are still enough to put the viewer in a state of slumber; there is almost no real action at any point in the movie.  Along the way, he encounters an old man in his grandmother’s apartment, who subsequently joins him on his tireless campaign.  The old man does not speak (again, why this is so crucial to the story line is never explained) but merely follows him around from one place to another.

By this point, most observers would be anticipating the marvelous solution that should ensue from all this; we expect a resolution that conveys some deep significance about 9/11 and, presumably, some meaningful lesson about the meaning of life.  This never happens.  The boy does find the owner, but there is no catharsis of any kind, and we are left wondering what the point was of this movie.  Given the disaster of 9/11 and all the lives destroyed, we might well ask the question: Is this the most the creators of this movie could come up with as a tribute to that awful event?  Is this humdrum story worthy of a major moviemaking effort?

Movie buffs will no doubt also notice the resemblance of this plot to Gunter Grass’s German film Die Blech Trommeln, or The Tin Drum, whose main character is named Oskar, the same name as the boy in Extremely Loud.  In Grass’s movie, the main character carries around a drum.  Here, he carries around a tambourine.  Again, we must ask: Why?  Is this supposed to be some kind of tribute to the earlier movie?  If so, the effort fails miserably.

There is no character development here, either.  Oskar, played by Thomas Horn, is consistently rude to everyone he encounters, a trait not likely to endear him to too many viewers.  The old man, played by Max Von Sydow, contributes nothing to the story line or to the search.  Most importantly though, there is no resolution of any kind.  We expect a profound ending that makes us introspective of the disaster of 9/11 and its portents for our future as well as telling us something profound about human nature; instead are left shaking our heads as to why they even bothered to make this movie.

On a scale of one to ten, I give this movie a two.