REVIEW: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close? More Like Utterly Dull and Mostly Insufferable
In 2005, when Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published, Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times Book Review, summed up the book’s “grand ambition” this way: “To take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn’t it be nicer if it weren’t.” Kirn couldn’t, at that point, have seen Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of the book. But with that sentence, he pretty much wrote the review in advance.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells the story of Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a perpetually wan 9-year-old New Yorker struggling with his father’s death in the events of 9/11. Dad Thomas (Tom Hanks, playing a particularly insufferable kind of ultra-reasonable dadness) was a jeweler by trade, but only because he wanted to make a decent life for himself, his wife Linda (an efficient but bloodless Sandra Bullock) and young Oskar. In reality, he was a science-nerd know-it-all type who would send Oskar out on field expeditions to discover new things about the city, and, it turns out, to get him comfortable talking to people. Oskar is a bit awkward in that department — at one point he precociously announces that he was once tested for “Asperger’s Disease,” but that “the results were inconclusive.” But of course.
Oskar is obviously traumatized by his father’s death, not least because in the last minutes of his life dad left several increasingly doomy messages on the family’s home answering machine, messages Oskar heard when he was sent home early from school on that fateful day. But he never tells his mother about them; instead, he turns inside himself, trying to…
Amber Brkich Amber Heard Amber Valletta America Ferrera Amerie Amy Cobb Amy Smart Ana Beatriz Barros
