Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

3/10

Directed by: Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot)
Screenplay by: Eric Roth (Forrest Gump)
Starring: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Thomas Horn, Max von Sydow, Viola Davis, John Goodman, Jeffrey Wright, Zoe Caldwell

If the sun were to explode, you wouldn’t even know about it for 8 minutes because that’s how long it takes for light to travel to us. For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm. It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him… were running out.

This is the best moment of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (EL+IC). It happens during the opening credits. And then it’s alllllll downhill from there.

They’re the words of nine-year old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), an uber-eccentric youngster who will make you reconsider the need to have kids. He’s walking contraception. Just excruciating on a level Haley Joel Osment would be proud of. There’s a moment when he throws a huge tantrum in his kitchen while his mum (Sandra Bullock) looks on. It’s actually pretty awkward to watch.

Did you ever see one of your mates chuck a tantrum in front of his parents while you were there just innocently playing Battletoads on the Nintento in their living room? That’s what this scene, and much of this movie, is like.

The kid actor, Thomas Horn, was apparently ‘discovered’ by one of EL+IC’s producers in 2010 when he won Jeopardy during kids week. Evidently some things, like Thomas Horn and oil in the Middle East, are best left undiscovered.

EL+IC is based on the novel of the same name by American novelist and Next Big Thing, Jonathan Safran-Foer. My wife read it and loved it. It was recommended to her by a friend whose heart, she said, was ‘broken and put back together again’ by this novel. So I’ll accept that the novel is good, although Mrs Dicker was wary from the outset whether the novel (apparently memorable for its unique typography, illustrations and voice) could be transported effectively onto the big screen. She was right to be wary.

The story follows this quirky kid, Oskar (named after the award his creators were contriving desperately to win; wishful nominative determinism?), as he struggles to cope with the loss of his father (Tom Hanks) on The Worst Day, as he calls it. 9/11. But here’s the hook: a year after the event, little Oskar is rifling through his dad’s stuff and finds a little envelope with ‘Black’ written on it; inside is a key. So we follow Oskar as he roams the streets of New York trying desperately to find whatever the key is meant to open in an attempt to hold onto those ‘8 minutes’ with his late father.

This hook is compelling at first, but the film is ultimately just ridiculous. There’s a moment where Oskar is walking along with his therapy tambourine (it apparently helps him with his anxiety), talking pretentious nonsense with The Renter (Max Von Sydow; an old man who only communicates by written notes or by showing the palms of his hands, which have ‘yes’ and ‘no’ tattooed on them), after Oskar has just talked to his Holocaust-survivor grandmother across the street via walkie-talkie, and you just want to hurl a brick at the screen.

Like me, you too will cry out to the cinematic gods for a normal. freakin. character. You’ll feel the need to leave the cinema afterwards and do the most normal thing you can think of. For me, it was going home, preparing Mee-Goreng instant noodles and watching CNN with a beer. This is my therapeutic Mee-Goreng-CNN-beer regime. Helps me recover from an unwanted overdose of pretentiousness.

So for 129 minutes (yep) EL+IC will distract you with the above quirky journey around New York City while its makers try to pull every tear-jerking trick on you they can imagine: an old man weeping as he struggles with some unknown pain; a young boy desperately missing his dead father; a widow crying in bed. But in my particular screening there was not a single tear in the audience. So, ipso facto, the makers were not tear-terking, they were just jerking.