Friday was an exciting day, as I had a record five joiners taking up my row. We saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same title (and he just happens to be coming to the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin in April!). Out of the six of us, four and a half have read the book—one has only read part of it, and one has yet to crack it. We raided the bathroom for toilet paper for those who forgot to bring tissue and found our place.
I’ll start with this: I really loved the book. It’s a little strange, a bit surreal. So the criticism I’ve been reading about the movie scared me off for a while—I was nervous to watch the movie version, afraid it would take away from my memory of the book. After the nomination for Best Picture was announced, in spite of all the slams it has taken in the media, I gathered my courage.
Often, when I really love a book, the movie version really has no chance of living up to it. And with the negative reviews, I had pretty much written this one off before I bought my ticket. I’m sort of glad for that.
My expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t have the same depth as the book. But the peculiarity of the young boy, Oskar, and his story remains intact, and I appreciated that. His search to find some sort of meaning in the horror that has profoundly changed his life is universal.
The Bible study group I am part of recently began studying the book of Job. We spent some time this week remembering times in our lives when we also have searched for meaning in suffering, searched for God in the suffering. We haven’t got it all figured out, but we share a gratitude that we have God and his people walking with us in those times. Loud and Close shows the importance of the people walking with us, and that gets half the story right, a step in the right direction.
Thomas Horn plays Oskar in a roll that demands a lot from a young actor and from the audience. Oskar is grieving the loss of his father. He is also somewhere on the autism spectrum, and he sometimes gets shrill and freaked out. This is understandable, but it might have been more effective if he wasn’t narrating constantly. Sometimes we might just need to have seen and not heard so much. Also, until you know that he has these issues, you would think that he’s a spoiled rotten kid who says and does whatever he wants, which sets up the viewer who has not read the book to dislike him almost immediately.
Oskar explores the city of New York, calling on strangers in a quest to discover something about his father. The city plays itself beautifully, by which I mean I enjoyed the filming of New York. One scene, in which a frightened Oskar fights his fear of bridges, shows him running across the bridge as a train speeds past him and the cars speed by even faster. It seems symbolic of his experience—everyone moving faster, passing him by, yet he is making his way eventually.
Viola Davis plays the woman he calls on first, and she’s fantastic in her small roll. Max Von Sydow gives great expression to his character, the renter at grandma’s house. Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks are good as the parents, as far as that goes, but they definitely take a back seat in the movie. I was glad for one scene in which Hanks, playing the oh-so-perfect father to Oskar, shows some slight frustration in dealing with his son’s hesitation to engage. A little more of that realism might have counteracted the sentimentalism. Bullock as mom has a few more honest scenes that she carries out well.
When the movie was finished, the theater emptied out but for the six of us and a few of us regained our composure. We tried to figure out how we felt about it. One of the reasons that the movie doesn’t carry the same weight as the book is that an important storyline was dropped. There’s no way that the movie could have covered all the written territory, and so this was probably inevitable. But the grandfather’s life story in the book adds so much to the reader’s experience, and we missed it.
The one among us who had not read the book at all told us she was a bit put off at the beginning by the imagined scenes of a man falling from one of the towers in 9/11. One friend suggested that the novel’s use of the image is more subtle, and I think that’s true. Also, the novel is more fragmented chronologically, and the movie is more straightforward in its time sequence. Somehow that takes some of the mystery out of it. One other observation: There is a certain amount of suspension of belief that is required of both the book and the movie, and I know that some dislike the book for that reason. That is probably even truer for the movie.
Is this Best Picture? Nope. It wraps up a sad story too neatly, too superficially. I’ve never lived in New York; I didn’t lose anyone in 9/11, so I can’t judge how I would feel if I had. Certainly it was a tragedy in my life like none other I’ve experienced, but perhaps a more direct connection would change the way I looked at the movie. But with the rather low expectations I came in with, I felt that it was worth watching. And just as the director would have wanted, my tissue was well used.
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