Daldry courts Oscars with film of best-selling 9/11 novel

What you need to know

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is directed by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours and The Reader) and based on Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling post 9/11 novel. It has been nominated for best film at the Oscars.
 
It follows a nine-year-old autistic boy, Oskar, as he searches New York City for the lock that matches a mysterious key left behind by his father, who died in the World Trade Center attacks.
 
Newcomer Thomas Horn plays Oskar. Tom Hanks appears in a series of flashbacks as Oskar’s father, Thomas Schell, and Sandra Bullock is Linda, Oskar’s grieving mother. Max von Sydow has received a best actor Oscar nomination for his role as The Renter, Oskar’s grandmother’s mute lodger.
 
What the critics like

The time is right for a sensitively made studio picture that addresses the confusion, anger and emptiness caused by 9/11, says Peter Debruge in Variety. “For some, Stephen Daldry's new film will be that movie.” There are strong performances from Bullock as Oskar’s mother, Max von Sydow as the mysterious Renter, and “modest yet touching contributions by Jeffrey Wright and John Goodman”.
 
Finding the right balance of sensitivity and boldness was critical to adapting Safran Foer's provocative novel to the screen, says Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. But Daldry is “up to the task”. The polarising subject and raw emotion in this film will probably make it divisive. Some will be troubled by the sentiment, others will think it doesn’t go deep enough, and some will resent it for even “trying to examine the wound”. It won't be the last cinematic word on 9/11, but it’s “an eloquent one”.
 
I don't know how Stephen Daldry does it, says John Patterson in The Guardian. He has conducted yet another masterclass in the confection of high-tone, middle-brow Oscar bait and has succeeded triumphantly. Rarely have I seen a movie so fine-tuned to drive the Academy into orgasms of approbation and applause. “It may not carry home the statuettes, but no one can say they didn't try everything.”
 
What they don’t like

The overarching problem with the film is obvious, says Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. While Oskar may have been a charming narrator in Foer’s intentionally rambling novel, “on screen he’s an almighty nuisance”. Disastrously, “neither Daldry nor his screenwriter Eric Roth seem to have considered this”.
 
Oskar’s childlike mix of naivety and wishful thinking is difficult to translate to film, says Ben Walters in Time Out. On screen it becomes “a cutesy fantasy of New York and a platitudinous account of trauma and bereavement”. Less a film about communication, than one “with its fingers in its ears”.
 
Oskar, howling as he races down the streets of New York, seems like a metaphor for a young nation working out its grief and acting out its rage, says Will Brooker in Times Higher Education. You can't help feeling for him. “But as an attempt to explore the complex legacy of 9/11, this film doesn't try incredibly hard, and doesn't really come close.”

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