Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Story: A young boy finds a key after his father's death in 9/11. His endeavour to find its lock transforms his life.

Movie Review: A thick, dark smoke hangs over Oskar Schell's (Thomas Horn) young heart since his father Thomas (Tom Hanks) died in the WTC attack. He bonded with his father and hates his mother. "I wish you were in the building instead of him," Oskar tells his mom. And he feels that the path to redemption could lie in a yellow key that one day he accidentally stumbles upon. The key was kept in an envelope in a blue vase and addressed to someone named Black. And the boy, both articulate and sensitive, makes it his mission to find its lock.

But in a city of over 400 listed Blacks, that's not easy. The movie takes Oskar to different people and places in the city: the Afro-American woman trapped in a bad marriage, the man who can't stop hugging him, the cranky woman who shoos him away. Midway in the endeavour, he makes friends with an old man who has stopped speaking by choice. It is an interesting relationship of unequals. Together they scan the city and the travels become a sort of therapy for both.

Fashioned for celluloid from a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close proceeds languidly like food being cooked overnight on slow fire. It is about loss, coping and illumination. Slowly the story of a boy's reconciliation with his self and his mother also becomes a moving tale of a city and everyone who lived through 9/11.

A meaner editor could have trimmed director Stephen Daldry's movie by 10 minutes making it a tighter, neater work. In small roles, Hanks and Bullock are in fine fettle. So is Max Von Sydow in the role of a grandfather. But as the argumentative and intelligent kid, Thomas Horn is the movie's real spine. His journey for the key's lock is both outward and inward. And sometimes it is also magical.