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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (DAVID LEE)

Why some filmmakers insist on certain choices, when not just good filmmaking precepts but their own raw material should tell them otherwise, is simply befuddling.
   
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a 2012 Oscar nominee for best picture, sets up what might have been a deeply compelling drama around the events of 9/11. If ever there was a film that does nothing but get in its own way, however, it’s this one; the filmmakers insist on so much superfluous distraction and didactic obviousness, they drain much of the underlying story’s genuine power.
   
The movie concerns young New Yorker Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), whose father Thomas (Tom Hanks) spins tall tales about their city, and makes of life a game for Oskar to engage his innocence and imagination. Then the twin towers fall on that fateful morning, claiming Thomas as a victim.
   
Some time afterward, Oskar discovers in a envelope a mysterious key among his father’s possessions. What knowledge the key may unlock about his father becomes an obsession for Oskar, as he tries to track down whomever bears the name Black that was written on that envelope.
   
As Oskar sets forth on his quest, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close should have us deeply involved. And so it would, had screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) and director Stephen Daldry (The Reader) not made certain inexplicable and unfortunate decisions.
   
We learn, for instance, that Oskar was tested for Asperger’s but the results were inconclusive. His intense, obsessive, even bizarre behaviour suggests he’s got something, anyway, as he breathlessly narrates his own adventures, inundating us with an endless stream of arcane knowledge.
   
But to what end? Why make this character have Asperger’s or what have you? The movie never concerns itself with his condition — whatever the kid’s deal is, it’s just distracting .
   
The filmmakers should have focussed on their compelling premise. People not on the autism spectrum have pursued obsessive courses following personal trauma; there’s no compelling dramatic or narrative reason to take this character to such extremes, to cloying effect.
   
Oskar’s voiceover dialogue is another problem. Perhaps his stream-of-consciousness was a feature of Jonathan Safran Foer’s source novel and the filmmakers were loathe to give it up. Whatever the reason, it’s obtrusive and overbearing — and it is allowed to prematurely blow a couple of key plot revelations before they’ve dropped their proper narrative weight. (For that matter, a completely gratuitous final twist also defuses the entire body of the picture.)
   
There’s a simpler, better movie lurking in this material. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close isn’t quite a bad film — but it’s certainly a frustrating and often unsatisfying one.