Stephen Daldry (2011)

It’s a sad story and a poor film:  the combination makes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a dispiriting (and long) two hours.  Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel is formally inventive and self-confident.  Stephen Daldry’s screen version, from a screenplay by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), is neither.  The book may be successful only in parts – but those parts include the main one:  the first person narrator, nine year old Oskar Schell, whose beloved father, Thomas, died on 9/11 when the South Tower went down.   This extraordinary kid has more than a touch of Asperger’s in his obsessive volatility and the mass of facts and figures he can keep in his head but he has a capacity for off-centre introspection too.  The character is a big challenge for a child actor – he needs to be on Oskar’s singular wavelength and to get inside his whirring brain.  One of the reasons I felt unhappy throughout the film was because it seemed unkind to think so badly of Thomas Horn, who plays Oskar.  This fourteen-year-old – he looks like an adolescent Frank Lampard – can act.  In terms of technical skill, he’s in a different class from, say, the children in Hugo.  And Stephen Daldry has had great success in the past directing boys, of different ages, on screen – Jamie Bell in Billy Elliot, Jack Rovello in The Hours.  Horn isn’t as free a performer as either of them, though, and his accomplishment is self-defeating.  Oskar is a brilliantly unstable personality; Thomas Horn is too evidently in control and his lack of essential eccentricity means that he isn’t funny.  In the book, Oskar’s humour and ability to make you laugh are crucial in complementing his anguish.

Although Oskar is in all but a few scenes of the film, he’s not the presence that he is in the novel.  The amount of voiceover narrative is modest but Daldry and Roth haven’t found anything to replace Oskar’s persistent voice.  The picture is handsomely shot by Chris Menges but it’s full of images and montages which, because they don’t express any point of view, are empty technical flourishes.  The soundtrack is dominated by an incontinent Alexandre Desplat score.  Oskar isn’t the sole narrator of the book:  his paternal grandparents also tell the story of their courtship, their lives together, their separation in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.   Jonathan Safran Foer connects 9/11 with other atrocities.  This works well enough when Oskar chooses Hiroshima as the subject for a school project but references to the bombing of Dresden in the grandparents’ recollections seem to be stretching a point.  It’s not much of a point anyway – just a fairly obvious reminder that Americans and their allies have shown themselves capable of inflicting as much harm on civilians as the 9/11 terrorists were.  Much of the grandparents’ story is in epistolary form.  The letters that may or may not have been received or read by those to whom they’re addressed are the basis of the novel’s failure-to-communicate theme, elaborated by the grandfather’s decision to stop speaking (and write things down instead to keep a conversation going), the halting walkie-talkie dialogue between Oskar and his grandmother whose apartment is on the opposite side of the road from the block where Oskar and his mother live, and the messages left on cell phones on what Oskar calls ‘the worst day’.  The accumulation of these variously problematic forms of communication is overworked by Safran Foer but it is at least coherent.   The paring down of it in the film reduces what’s left – mostly the grandfather’s pen-and-paper responses to Oskar’s torrent of spoken words – to contrived oddity.  It’s disconnected and tedious – not least because, of course, the old man’s speed-writing still slows scenes down.

Jonathan Safran Foer is a showoff writer, especially in his linguistic grandstanding.  (I liked Extremely Loud enough that I then started on his earlier success Everything Is Illuminated, which I found unreadable beyond fifty pages.)  His attempts to universalise Oskar’s story work only in part.   At one point in the novel, Safran Foer, through Oskar, perceives that, ultimately, we’re all trapped in a burning skyscraper.  The insight is offensive, since the victims of 9/11 were trapped in a real burning skyscraper as well as a metaphorical one.  He’s more successful in making you feel, through the unique details of Oskar’s horror and bereavement, for all the young children who lost parents on 9/11.  The text of the book is interleaved with photographs of the falling man and assorted other visuals.  I guess many people will regard this as meretricious and tastelessly eye-catching but I could accept it.  The photographs not only connect with Oskar’s obsessions but seem to admit that these are the definitive description of 9/11, which a fictional treatment can’t get beyond.  What holds the novel together are the detail and relentlessness of Oskar’s fertile imagination, and his quest to find the lock for a key he’s discovered in his father’s wardrobe, in an envelope with the name ‘Black’ on it.  In life, Thomas Schell loved to design complicated, clue-based ‘assignments’ for his son:  Oskar loved to carry these out, in partnership with his father, and the search for the lock is a post-mortem continuation of the family tradition.  This is all an admittedly obvious metaphor for the boy’s trying to make sense of the baffling fact of his father’s death (although Thomas Schell’s body was never found) but it works because the quest for the lock is realised in a highly individual way.

That quest gives the story road-movie potential and the succession of characters that Oskar meets on his journey – working his way, on foot and alphabetically, through all the Blacks in the local directory – are wonderful.  As I read the book, I kept thinking how good these encounters could be in a dramatisation; when I saw the cast for the film adaptation, the prospect was mouthwatering.  It’s one of the biggest letdowns of Extremely Loud on screen that there’s never any momentum to Oskar’s search and that most of his meetings are abbreviated to almost nothing – no more than is needed to fix each Black that he visits with a single characteristic or two.  As Abby Black, Oskar’s first port of call on his journey, Viola Davis is once again very impressive – she’s able, with great economy and in spite of the thin writing, to suggest a complete character – and, although the staging of the crucial later scene between Oskar and Abby’s (ex-) husband isn’t imaginative, Jeffrey Wright plays the latter sensitively.  For the most part, though, the actors in smaller roles are wasted.   John Goodman as the apartment block doorman Stan and Zoe Caldwell as Oskar’s grandmother have virtually nothing to do.

Max von Sydow is powerfully expressive in the early stages when, as the silent Thomas Schell Sr, he’s listening to Oskar and to the voice messages the boy’s father left at the apartment on the morning of 9/11.  But even von Sydow can’t transcend the writing-not-speaking routine.  (This is one of the ideas in the novel that’s ridiculous once it’s exposed to physical reality.  After not very long, the only thought it provokes is wondering how many notebooks the grandfather must get through.)   Tom Hanks’s warmth and flair for eccentricity make his casting as Oskar’s father understandable but he looks a bit too old for the part and the lack of spark between him and Thomas Horn is disappointing.  Oskar feels cut off from his mother, Linda, which probably gives Sandra Bullock an advantage over Hanks.  She gives a well-judged performance although the climactic scene in which she explains to her son that she knew what he was up to all along when he left the block with his backpack is so protracted that it dilutes the power this revelation has in the book.  (The idea that his mother, unbeknown to Oskar, is keeping an eye on him gives added poignancy to his father’s no longer being there to do so.)

The film’s rendering of how Oskar and other people in his life get the better of their own fears and weaknesses is so pallid that it’s not even annoying.   It says everything about this movie that its most emotionally affecting moments come when Linda Schell takes a call at work to learn from her husband that the work meeting he’s gone to was in the World Trade Center.  She looks out from her office window and watches the burning Twin Towers as Thomas assures her that he’s fine.   Sandra Bullock plays and Tom Hanks speaks this conversation very well but it’s a generic 9/11 scene – it doesn’t connect at all with the particularity of Jonathan Safran Foer’s treatment of the subject.   It’s also confusing:  if Thomas knows Linda is at work, why does he keep leaving messages on the answering machine at home (unless he expects Oskar to be picking them up – but why would he?)?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a smart title.  It’s simply right for 9/11.  It includes what are revealed, in the book’s (though not the film’s) narrative, to be Oskar’s two favourite adverbs.   It refers specifically to the way his grandmother sounds when she inexpertly tries to take part in the two-way radio conversations with Oskar.  It refers more largely to the intolerability of feeling too much about other people and the impact of losing them.  This is why Oskar can’t pick up the phone in the apartment and Thomas has to leave his final message, and why Oskar then buys a replacement answering machine and secretes the old one containing the messages so that his mother and grandmother don’t have to hear them.  The film, rather desperately, justifies its name in its closing stages when Linda Schell discovers a(n unfinished) book that chronicles an earlier assignment that Thomas set for Oskar – the front page lettered with ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’. Safran Foer’s title is, as well as clever, irritating (partly because it’s clever).   Critics enraged by the film have been able to get their own back by cheaply insulting it as ‘Extremely Tiresome and Incredibly Manipulative’, or words to that effect.  One of the few elements of the novel that emerges clearly here is the metaphoric aspect of the story that Thomas tells Oskar about the disappeared sixth borough of New York City.  It comes eventually to stand for the community of the dead of 9/11 (Thomas’s sixth voice message was his last).  ‘The Sixth Borough’ might have been a better title for the film.  On the subject of numbers:  this is Stephen Daldry’s fourth cinema feature and his first thoroughgoing failure.

18 February 2012