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| Tom Hanks and Thomas Horn |
Dan - I have kind of a weird goal each year to watch all of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture before the awards are handed out if possible. And while I have only accomplished it one time (in 2010), I still make an effort to watch all of the nominees at some point. This was the final movie of 2011's nominees that I had not seen. My expectations were not very high as everything I had read suggested it was a mediocre movie at best. To my surprise it was much better than mediocre.
This is the story of a boy whose father (played by Tom Hanks) died in the events of 9/11. The boy, Oskar, is fairly eccentric and has some OCD tendencies to say the least. Oskar finds a key in his father’s belongings and takes it upon himself to find the lock that to which it belongs. With only the word Black written on the envelope to go on, Oskar decides it must be a person’s name and sets out to visit all of the people with the name of Black listed in the NYC phone book.
This movie deals with a lot of emotions that occur in a mind too young and undeveloped to truly understand them, indeed many adults may struggle with also (I know I do). Oskar deals mostly with fear, loss, anger, and love. About halfway through the movie after a particularly angry argument that Oskar has with his mother, they both begin to process some of the feelings they have about losing their husband/father. Linda tells Oskar that why and how his father died "doesn’t make sense" so there is no point in trying to understand in the first place. She doesn’t know why it all happened nor does she have the answers to his questions, but nevertheless tries to help him understand that he may not ever find them.
My own mother passed away when I was barely a teenager from cancer and I still don’t know the "why" of a lot of things. I remember asking my dad why this was happening to our family and he didn’t know the answer for himself let alone for me. So I feel like I can relate to Oskar in some small way. Not completely of course, since it was my mother and not my father who died and I had several months to prepare for the inevitable while Oskar’s loss was sudden, unexpected, and the direct result of someone else’s actions. But the underlying emotions are still the same: fear, loss, anger, and love. I was just a kid trying to make sense out of something that does not.
There is a powerful scene where Oskar is watching TV at the moment when the first tower collapses, and just as it begins the camera cuts to Oskar collapsing to his knees in a similar way as he puts it together that his father didn’t make it out of the World Trade Center. The images of the towers collapsing are forever in my mind (as with most people), but that shot alone helped the movie resonate that much more and seemed to tie the tragedies of the story more tightly together.
I liked this movie. I liked the characters. They felt real to me. Newcomer Thomas Horn was quite impressive taking on a character like Oskar and pulled it off handsomely. Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock as parents bring home the reality that being a parent is not easy and they aren’t invincible to either emotional insults or even life itself. Even Max von Sydow (in an Oscar nominated role) who never speaks a word was a great character. He conveys so much with only his facial expressions that he seemed to feel the words he wasn’t speaking.
I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. The emotions reflected in the characters and how they deal with loss is what resonated most with me. I am still amazed at how seeing videos and images of 9/11 still gives me chills, not to mention stories that are interwoven into those events (even if they are fictional).
Nerd Note: Director Stephen Daldry only has done four feature films in his career. All four of his movies have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (even though none have ever won) - Billy Elliot, The Hours, The Reader, and now Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
Mark -
This movie is one of the most difficult for me to rate, and it all has to do with the main character of the film. The main character of this film is portrayed by a new child actor appearing in his first film, Thomas Horn. Horn plays the character of Oskar Schell, a nine year old boy who is extremely independent by nature but dealing with the loss of his one true friend, his father. His father Thomas, played by Tom Hanks, loved to create elaborate puzzles for Oskar, testing his already high knowledge for his age, while encouraging Oskar to have to search deeply and abstractly at times for the simplest of solutions. When Thomas is suddenly killed in the World Trade Center catastrophe, Oskar is left without the solution to the final puzzle that Thomas created. A year after Thomas’s death, Oskar finds a mysterious key amongst Thomas’s belongings, and thus starts Oskar’s newest hunt for his answer. The key is found inside of an envelope with the name Black written on it. Oskar sets out to contact everyone in New York City with the last name Black, hoping to find the owner of the key, and in return answers from his Thomas.
For me Oskar is one of, if not the most difficult character to try to relate to in all of the films I have seen. By nature you want to root for him to find the answers he is looking for, but his awkwardness and often spiteful nature push you away from giving your full support to him. I haven’t read the book, which I am assuming would give a more detailed description as to why he acts the way he does, but due to the lack of description in the adaptation, the audience is left with the little knowledge that Oskar was once “tested” for Aspergers, but the results were “inconclusive.” I’m not trying to be insensitive in any way, but in order to try and give Oskar the benefit of the doubt in a lot of situations, I was left almost hoping that he had some type of mental or behavioral disorder so that there is an explanation and reason for his actions. I wish that there was more explanation in the film about what if anything he is dealing with, because otherwise he just comes off as an extremely selfish, bratty kid with absolutely no filter on what he says or does.
In contrast to Oskar, the film’s supporting actors and actresses are amazing! Max von Sydow plays a character known as The Renter, and it is one of my favorite characters of all time. Von Sydow plays a character that is mute by choice, and that we later find out happens to be Thomas’s father, who abandoned Thomas and his mother at a young age. Von Sydow was well deserved of his Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, and if not for being in the most competitive category the past few years, likely would have won. Along with Von Sydow I thought the performances of Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, and Sandra Bullock were very good.
For a variety of reasons this movie isn’t going to be for everyone, but there are definitely some strong reasons to watch it. While the tragedy of 9/11 plays a role in the story of this film, it is by no means the only, or the main, focus of the film. 3 ½ *’s out of 5
MY RANDOM THOUGHT FOR EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE:
Going off of my earlier comment about the nominated performances of actors in a supporting role, I would strongly recommend seeing all of the films from last years category. Nick Nolte in Warrior, Jonah Hill in Moneyball, Kenneth Branagh in My Week With Marilyn, Christopher Plummer in Beginners, and of course Max Von Sydow in this film all gave amazing performances.
