Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a Review by Y
I have to admit, I've been avoiding this review about as much as I avoided even seeing this film, but for two completely different reasons.
I avoided the film because I thought it was going to be one of those mushy, gooey, sacchrine. obnoxious films that I would find myself bored with by the 5 minute mark.
I've been avoiding this review because... well, I am not entirely sure I can do it justice. But, I guess I'll try anyway.
I will start by saying, obviously, that my assumptions about this film were absolutely, positively, incorrect. It may have very few schmaltzy mushy moments, and the few that it had were easily lost among the emotionally jarring moments, or scenes that were just so stunning that you either don't notice, or don't care. For the most part the mushy scenes are so well done that it's not obnoxious.
This film starts just before 9/11/2001 and follows a boy named Oskar Schell (played by Thomas Horn) and his parents Linda and Thomas Schell (Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks) and their family life, or more specifically the closeness between Oskar and Thomas and the stories that Thomas would tell Oskar about things like the "Sixth Borrough" of New York. Thomas had created a scavenger hunt to prove the existance of the Sixth Borrough, shortly before a sales meeting at the World Trade Center.
A Year later, Oskar finds an item among his father's things and decides to find out what it means by visiting every single person in New York City who could possibly be connected to this item and the only clue he has is a name: Black. Oskar finds that there are 475 people in NYC with the last name of Black, and the rest of the film follows Oskar's journey to get closer to his father Thomas, even though he died, and to try to understand why someone could be taken from him by someone he's never met, and never wronged.
Though the film doesn't follow a strictly linear beginning->middle->end schema and jumps around a bit to the past in the form of flashbacks, it's done well and in a very consistent fashion that makes sense rather than adding confusion to the film. While I would love to give more details about this film, I can't. It will ruin this film. That's not a cop-out, and once you see it you will completely understand. We all remember where we were on that day, and it's been likened to our generation's Kennedy assassination, and though I had expected this to be a really lame 'family film', instead what I got was a film so powerful and emotional that it HAD to wait 10 years to be made. It is far too powerful of a film to have been made close to 9/11 while the wounds were still open.
Check out Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close if you'd like to see a great film about someone trying desperately to hold onto someone the lost, while at the same time touching the lives of everyone they encounter along the journey in a deeply meaningful way. It might just touch you just the same. Also, be on the lookout for Thomas Horn. That kid is going to be one hell of a prolific actor when he gets a bit older. His performance was vastly beyond his years, and it's hard to imagine so much emotion coming from such a small frame but he delivers amazingly.
--Yearrghsworth