Mindful of those past commercial failures and yet eager to test the waters as to how much of that day audiences will willingly re-experience a decade later, Stephen Daldry's new film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, based on the book by Jonathan Safran Foer, tries to have it both ways. The bulk of the movie does indeed take place roughly a year after 9/11 and follows the exploits of young Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a precocious nine-year old whose jeweler father Thomas (Tom Hanks) perished in the attacks. Oskar worshipped his dad and Thomas in turn was head over heels in love with his oddball son, designing elaborate mysteries for him to solve in an effort to coax him out of his shell and engage with the world (it's implied that Oskar may suffer from a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome). After his father's untimely death, the boy discovers clues to what he believes might be Thomas's last puzzle -- specifically, an unmarked key in a small manila envelope with the name "Black" written on it. In his highly organized and efficient way, Oskar sets about finding every single person named "Black" in the five boroughs, journeying all the way from Hamilton Heights, Manhattan to Fort Green, Brooklyn to the Far Rockaways, Queens. Joining him for part of his multi-week investigation is the mute, elderly boarder (Max von Sydow) who has taken up residence in his grandmother's spare room... although anyone that has ever seen a movie before (let alone read the book) will likely be able to guess this man's actual identity in seconds.

Interspersed with this material are sequences that actually take place on the morning of September 11, albeit not at Ground Zero (there are a few shots of the smoking towers, though, most of them taken directly from news footage). Instead, these scenes unfold largely in the Upper West Side apartment Oskar now only shares with his mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock). Having been let go from school early due to the events going on downtown, the boy made his way home and discovered 6 messages on the answering machine, all of them from Thomas, who was trapped on the 106th floor of one of the towers and spent his last hour alive desperately trying to reach his son to say goodbye. Unable to let go of this last memento from his father, Oskar has hidden the answering machine in his room and listens to those messages almost every night, a routine that both upsets and comforts him. You could say the same thing about the impact these scenes (the best ones in the entire movie) have on the audience. Watching 9/11 re-enacted in microcosm -- with this one boy learning of his father's fate in almost real time -- is wrenching, but also oddly reassuring in that we're able to experience the event without being entirely consumed by grief.

Too bad that the rest of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close could be more accurately described as Extremely Mawkish and Incredibly Irritating. Much of the blame, I'm sorry to say, falls on young Horn's slender shoulders. To a certain extent, Daldry basically sets him to fail by handing him the thankless task of playing a character whose behavior regularly toggles between obnoxious and absurd. Perhaps if the movie itself was imbued with a larger dose of magical realism -- as in, say, Terry Gilliam's marvelous The Fisher King -- Oskar's eccentricities would be easier to tolerate. (Daldry would be the wrong director for that kind of approach anyway, though. He tries on a more impressionistic visual style in a few sequences and the results are embarrassing to behold.) But all too often you're left wondering why the various Blacks he visits don't simply call the cops and report that there's an unattended nine-year-old kid traveling around New York City harassing people. (The story does contain a late-inning "twist" intended to explain why everyone welcomes Oskar with open arms, but it's just as improbable as the rest the narrative.) This may explain why the rest of the supporting cast, which also includes Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright in key roles, walk through the movie seeming heavily narcotized; if they had all their wits about them, they wouldn't indulge Oskar's self-centered antics. The fact that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close contains a few moments of genuine honesty about the pain of losing a loved one in general and the tragedy of 9/11 in particular makes its descent into typical Hollywood hokum that much more disappointing.

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