Francois Duhamel
Oskar (Thomas Horn) loses his father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), in the 2001 World Trade Center attack.
A great actor can sometimes take over a movie so thoroughly, with a personality of such magnetism, that we forget all the skepticism and questions the script leaves in its wake. That happens in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," where Thomas Horn delivers the finest leading performance I saw in a movie made in 2011.
He was 12 years old when he did it. He had never stood in front of a camera on a professional production, except for a version of "Jeopardy!" on which kids competed. Yet he gets so deeply into the whirling mind of Oskar Schell, dominating every scene he's in - which is almost every scene, period - that he lifts the movie out of the realm of "Forrest Gump"-like emotional manipulation to a higher level of artistry.
Eric Roth, who adapted the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, also wrote "Gump." The two stories start from the same place: A sweet, sensitive young man being raised by a single mom realizes he can't function as "normal" people do in this world and tries to find a way to use his talents productively. (By coincidence - or is it? - Tom Hanks appears in both, here playing Oskar's dad.)
Oskar, however, knew and loved his father deeply. Thomas Schell led his son on expeditions around Manhattan, inventing stories of a vanished "sixth borough" and sending the boy on scavenger hunts. (When told to find something from every decade in Manhattan, Oskar returns with a single rock, which has indeed been there for a hundred years.)
Thomas dies in the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, and the disconsolate boy begins to draw away from his mother (Sandra Bullock). Oskar finds a blue vase in his dad's closet; it contains an envelope labeled "Black" and an unidentified key. He resolves to visit everyone named Black in New York until he learns what the key will open, hoping to find one last gift from dad.
Symbols and sensitivity
The movie seems self-consciously arty at times: The spelling of Oskar's first name links him to the boy in Gunter Grass' "The Tin Drum," who refused to grow up because of the horrors of adult life; his last name indicates that he's a "shell" waiting to be filled after his father was snatched away.
The incomparable Max von Sydow shows up as a mysterious tenant living with Oskar's grandmother (Zoe Caldwell). But in a story like this one, he has to be a mute who chose to stop speaking decades ago because of some horror he won't relate. He accompanies Oskar on his rounds among the Blacks, scribbling on a pad and lifting the palms with "no" and "yes" written on them to answer questions. (Why doesn't he just nod or shake his head?)
But among all the improbabilities of the search, despite the tortuous and unlikely explanation at the end, the movie never seems false. That's partly because of the superb supporting cast - not just the aforementioned actors but Jeffrey Wright, Viola Davis and John Goodman - and sensitive direction by Stephen Daldry, who made two other films about alienated adolescents ("Billy Elliot," "The Reader").
And whenever the movie totters toward sentimentality, young Thomas Horn snatches it back. The title refers not only to the explosions of that fatal September day but the way the whole world appears to Oskar: He tells people his test for Asperger's syndrome was inconclusive, but the movie makes that condition seem likely.
He's troubled by the speed, noise and chaos of almost every element of the modern world. Oskar can't go on swings, walk across bridges, enter the dark chasm of steps leading to the subway. Horn makes him physically fragile but emotionally resilient, determined - one might say obsessed - to gain the last bit of knowledge that will cement his father in memory. Your heart may or may not go out to the movie itself, but he'll capture it.
