Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close extremely unrealistic, incredibly subpar

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, feature 3, Grace Battista, issue 15, Entertainment - By Grace Battista on Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 01:31

A week ago, I thought I had seen a fair amount of pajamas. Flannel, footie, the kind with the butt flap, waffle knit long johns, I knew it all. I even considered myself an owner of quite an extensive collection of bedtime wear. However, this was before I had seen Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and its pajama-hoarding protagonist Oskar Schell.

The movie, directed by Stephen Daldry and Best Picture nominee, follows resident New Yorkers: the Schell family. Oskar Schell, played by Kid’s Week “Jeopardy!” winner Thomas Horn, is a nine-year-old self-proclaimed amateur inventor and pacifist who owns an astonishing array of pajamas. He starts off in a lovely superhero pair while his father Thomas, the beloved Tom Hanks, tells him fanciful stories of New York City’s sixth borough.

Thomas and Oskar form a charming father-son duo balanced by Sandra Bullock’s practical and loving nature as the mother, Linda Schell. Also in the family is Oskar’s grandmother, played by Zoe Caldwell, who is his walkie-talkie buddy and piano teacher.

This lovably quirky and close family is blown apart when 9/11 steals Thomas from them. Oskar, a pensive child with emotionally “heavy boots,” is particularly traumatized by the loss of his dad. While rooting around in Thomas’s closet one day, he finds a key in an envelope labeled “Black.” Sure that this must be a mission left for him by his late father, Oskar scours the phonebook for everyone with the last name of Black and sets out on a journey to find whatever the key opens.

His search takes him across the five boroughs, forcing him to conquer some of his very irrational fears (children without parents, bridges, the subway, people running, people stopping...) and unites him with hundreds of Blacks.

He meets a woman with lots of loud children, a gospel singing church lady, a shaken divorcee, a lovely young cello player and many other warm characters.

While the idea of a damaged boy finding love and light in these “real” characters after the death of his father is romantic, I find the fact that he didn’t run into a single drug dealer, crack whore or pedophile a bit far fetched.

Naturally, a film centered around a small child trying to deal with an inevitable truth that stuns even the sagest of us brings up some heavy emotions. During the film, I was constantly on the precipice of sobbing, listening to voicemails his dad left before his death and watching Linda trying to cope with Oskar and his hysterics.

This emotional thunderstorm never fully subsided, as much as the parade of warm and fuzzy “Blacks” tried. The movie, a long and sad 129 minutes, skipped around too much emotional melodrama to make conclusions that were anything more than hollow and clichéd.

The movie is based on a novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is perhaps a better medium for a story that lacks an exciting plot and requires more thematic development.

However, the cinematography was stunning and the melancholy soundtrack fit the subject matter like a glove. Gray New York City, with that wintry cold sunshine, looked beautiful and Thomas Horn’s eyes seemed to reflect every skyscraper.

Artistic representations of his father falling turned something that could have been chaotic and gory into a beautifully, tragic mid-air ballet.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was not extremely long or incredibly good. It was neither extremely hairy nor incredibly funny or extremely heart wrenching and incredibly insightful. There were some shots that were actually extremely loud and incredibly close, which left my senses reeling.

Besides feeling depressed and tired, and not in the good “I really discovered something deep about life” way, the main thought I left with was, “Where did Oskar get his rocket ship jammies?”