The story of a boy who lost his farther on 9/11. But that isn’t tragic enough. The boy has to be autistic. His grandfather has to be a victim of post traumatic stress himself. And the images we see lead us to believe that the boy’s father was one of the jumpers-someone who chose to fall to their death rather than burn alive.
9/11 is the foundation of the story, but the real tale is how our young hero deals with the tragedy. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a fragmented film with lots of flashbacks to both the good old days when Dad was happily playing with son and the worst day when he leaves six messages on the answering machine that our hero listens to over and over again.
There is plenty of drama and heartache to go around. The film is beautiful to look at and the music is wonderfully depressing. We spend most of the film wandering around obscure parts of New York City. Our hero follows a clue left by his father which involves him looking up everyone named Brown-it seems that his father never taught him how to use a phone and he isn’t that fond of mass transportation either.
In the end we hear all six messages and the boy solves the last puzzle left for him by his father. We also learn more about how the father died and what his mother has been doing while he’s been wander all over the city knocking on stranger’s doors.
There’s a lot of voice-over while our hero goes about the business of being a depressed savant who makes overly complex visual aides to help him with his various quests. As with any movie in which a child is the star, our hero lives in a world where money and time are unlimited and adults might ask him why he isn’t in school, but do nothing when he tells them a blatant lie. He also has the annoying habit of shaking a tambourine all the time and no one ever tells him to knock it off or even gives it a second glance.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was heartbreaking in spots where any story about the terrorist attacks of 9/11 would be heartbreaking-and that’s the problem here. There are thousands of real life stories of heartbreak and sorrow-why do we need some fair tale to try and take their place?
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