Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

Extremely sad & incredibly hard to watch, this has its merits, as Thomas Horn earns his Best Young Actor Critics' Choice Award as 9-year-old Oskar, a multi-phobic boy searching for a mystery left by his father who died in the twin towers on 9/11. The movie is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Max von Sydow, whose character doesn't speak. Horn also won two awards from the Phoenix Film Critics Society for this role. I complained in my post on War Horse that I hate war movies. I'm also disturbed by photographic reminders of 9/11, which Oskar refers to as, "The Worst Day," and am not sure I would have seen this one either had it not gotten that Best Picture nod. Tom Hanks (last in these pages in Larry Crowne) plays the departed father and Sandra Bullock (after I wrote about her in The Proposal she was in The Blind Side) the patient grieving mother. Oskar's relationship with his grandmother (Zoe Caldwell, four-time Tony winner, she played the Countess, one of the on-screen people, in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), among others) is particularly sweet--they keep walkie-talkies close at hand to communicate privately and frequently across the street from one another. Oskar meets dozens of people in his pursuit of the mystery, most notably von Sydow (Shutter Island) and Viola Davis (The Help).

Stephen Daldry (profiled in The Reader) directs and Eric Roth (covered in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) adapted Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel of the same name (with "and" instead of "&"). I loved the 2005 movie made from his 2002 novel Everything is Illuminated (I haven't read either book). This plot is quite rich, although Jack and I and others I've talked with wanted it to go on just a little longer to answer one question.

The score by the prolific Alexandre Desplat (last in Carnage) has been posted on youtube for our enjoyment. Jack was with me when I saw it last Friday, but we mostly talked about what we didn't like, and he's long asleep now, so I can't vouch for him. Bring your hankies. I first needed mine when Oskar began shouting all the things that scared him. As one who was born in New York, as were a number of my relatives, I had a hard time reliving the horror of The Worst Day, but I guess I'm glad I saw it.