Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

How will anybody ever be able to make a truly good movie about 9/11, one that hits all of the right emotional notes even as it tells a compelling story in a manner worthy of an $11 movie ticket? The real question probably isn't "how" but rather "when". The fact of the matter is, just over ten years since what this film's protagonist calls "the worst day", we still don't know how to respond; maybe in ten more years, or twenty, or fifty, we'll finally get it right.

In one regard, that's what this film is all about, though: not knowing how to respond. A newcomer actor holds his own in the lead role, playing a young boy with a touch of Asperger's syndrome who lives on the Upper West Side and was let out of school early on September 11. Arriving home, alone, he realizes that his beloved father (Tom Hanks) is in one of the Twin Towers. He'd never see his dad again. Devastated, he later discovers a key hidden in his father's closet inside an envelope with the name "Black" handwritten on it. The youngster decides that the key must be some part of an elaborate plan of his father's to leave a "final message" for his son, and that by finding the lock for which the key was made, closure will finally come. Closure hasn't come from his crying mother (Sandra Bullock) who doesn't seem to relate to him like his father did. And closure certainly didn't come from burying an empty casket at a funeral service, the movie's opening scene. The young boy, Oskar, found such an event absurd. And it is.

We follow Oscar, and all of his quirks, all around New York's bouroughs as he searches for...something. A person. A lock. Anything to make nonsense make sense. Beautiful images of the Park and the Brooklyn Bridge and other places call out to anyone who loves the City. This film's director, Stephen Daldry (The Reader) is good at tackling difficult subject matter and making it palatable for a general, popcorn-eating audience. You can't blame him for trying this story out. And the supporting cast here, including Viola Davis (who cries! Yes!), John Goodman, Jeffrey Wright, and Max von Sydow, is superb. And when the credits roll and it's time to leave the theater, you feel a little bit of what the film's characters feel, years after the worst day, trying to move on with life: like there must be something more. Like it shouldn't be over yet. Like there's still a mystery to be solved. Like if we just had a little more of...something, whatever it is, then we'd finally be satisfied.