So Close and Yet So Far

The Academy Awards have spent the last few years tinkering with their formula. The year that The Dark Knight failed to garner a Best Picture nomination spurred an increase from the traditional 5 nominees to 10, the thinking being that an expanded field would increase the chances of more mainstream fare getting into the mix (thereby increasing interest and television broadcast ratings).

Instead, 10 nominees meant that some fairly objectively unworthy films got in, and there was a clearly divided list of the "real" contenders (that would have gotten in even had the list been limited to 5) and the "also-rans." So last year, the Academy tinkered some more. This time, there would be a variable number of nominees between 5 and 10. A film would have to get a certain percentage of first place votes to be eligible for a nomination; if a film failed to get enough, then any voters who'd backed it would instead have their second choice votes counted.

The result of this system yielded a batch of nominees that included a few nominees that were clearly loved passionately by a very small group of people... and openly despised by others. The poster child of this was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a film adapted from a novel about a young boy trying to cope with the death of his father in the World Trade Center collapse on September 11, 2001. Enough people thought this was the best movie of 2011 to make it a nominee for Best Picture, yet the overall critical consensus was that it was a saccharine mess. Thinking of the soft spot I have for a few movies like Pay It Forward, I decided to give this film a chance and see where it fell for me.

I must side definitely with the masses on this. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close feels like a movie manufactured by some sort of dramatic Madlib, callously incorporating elements selected to make people cry: September 11th, a child with some non-specified degree of autism, pining for a lost father, an old man who has psychologically lost the ability to speak, an estranged couple, and more. This cynical mix is then arranged in a structure overly reliant on flashbacks, as though someone took a writing course where the teacher said that non-linear narratives are more sophisticated. The result is robotic and transparent.

The cast includes a number of good actors, including Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Viola Davis, and Max von Sydow. But the star of the show is an unknown child actor named Thomas Horn, who isn't up to carrying the film, and is outclassed by his experienced co-stars. I did perk up momentarily at a couple of solid moments where those veterans power their way around the workmanlike script. There are brief bursts of genuine emotion (Bullock compellingly conveys the lengths a mother will go to in helping her son; von Sydow wordlessly shows a painfully deep anguish), but overall the film comes off as an effort from someone familiar with emotions without truly understanding them.

If you just want to watch a 9/11 film, see the vastly superior United 93 (which has the added bonus of being based on a true story). But by all means, stay away from this. I give it a D.