Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Why have one emotionally drenched ending when you can have three? The fact Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader) and his screenwriter Eric Roth ( Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) feel the need to awkwardly and sentimentally wrap up and underline every narrative thread in their adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close represents much of what's wrong with their movie. Which is a shame because it could have been a modest and affecting reflection of post 9/11 grief.

And yet ... there are moments in the film that come awfully close to doing just that. Despite Daldry's penchant for art-house schmaltz, there is something insistently poignant just beneath his movie's surface. Most of it comes courtesy of Teen Jeopardy! contestant and first-time actor Thomas Horn. Though his character, 9-year-old Oskar Schell, is more a literary conceit than flesh-and-blood human (he is a tambourine-shaking, subway-phobic, high-functioning autistic who monologues like a graduate from the Iowa School of Writing), Horn's naturalistic performance is so unmannered, expressive, and spontaneous that it almost overcomes every self-consciously precocious personality tic Foer has constructed. Almost.

Equally good is Max Von Sydow, the mute and mysterious "renter" in Oskar's grandmother's apartment who — spoiler alert for those too dull to figure it out within minutes of his introduction — is actually Oskar's long-lost grandfather. Von Sydow not only emotionally connects with the child actor; he conveys a lifetime of sorrows with only his eyes and hands. It's a remarkably patient and generous performance that grounds Roth's overly contrived, relentlessly maudlin, and thematically obvious script.

Oskar is the son of Thomas, a Manhattan jeweler played by Tom Hanks (the last actor I'd have imagined as a New York Jew). Thomas uses Oskar's love of puzzles to concoct an elaborate scavenger hunt, in order to encourage him to interact with the outside world. Unfortunately, he's killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, leaving Oskar and his grieving mother (Sandra Bullock) to pick up the pieces. When Oskar finds a key hidden inside a vase in his father's closet he sets out on a quest to find out what it opens, hoping it's a message from his dad (a plot that it shares with Hugo). With only the surname "Black" to guide him, Oskar develops a system for tracking down every person with that name in the five boroughs (there are more than 800), hoping one will explain the key's secret. This introduces Oskar to a wide assortment of New Yorkers, each who reacts differently to the boy's arrival. In a plot twist that strains belief, the one that matters most is a couple caught in mid-divorce (Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright).

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