Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Photo taken from IMDb.com

With the Oscars occurring this past weekend, I decided to attempt to watch all of the best picture nominations, and out of all the movies that I have succeeded in watching so far, I felt that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close deserved some recognition.

Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, this movie tells the story of a young boy dealing with his father’s death on 9/11. Thomas Horn plays Oskar Schell, an eccentric young boy who enjoys going on “reconnaissance expeditions” with his father.  Oskar’s vivid imagination leads him to  believe that his father has left him one final expedition to accomplish in the wake of his death. In Oskar’s final reconnaissance expedition, he visits people all across New York to try and find the lock to which a key his father had fits.  In his travels, he meets many people, telling them his story and hearing theirs.  The young boy commits his entire heart to this in a vain attempt to keep his father’s presence with him longer and to help reconcile himself with his own secret about 9/11.

Having read the book before the movie, I felt like the movie was a fairly accurate depiction; yet it was a depiction that was brutally hard to watch on screen.  9/11 has always been a very turmoil-filled topic, one that many my age have particularly found to resonate in our own lives.  A lot of people have said that this movie was only nominated because of it’s politically fueled topic; I don’t believe this is the case. I felt myself experiencing the differing stages of grief with the characters: the mother who has lost her husband and is gradually losing her son as well, the boy who is searching for meaning in meaningless death, an old man attempting to reconcile with his past by assisting the young boy who lives across the street… They all mourned the tragedy of 9/11 in their own ways.

Truthfully, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will probably not receive the Best Picture Oscar, especially against other critically acclaimed movies like The Artist and Hugo, but it does deserve to be recognized for it’s stark depiction of familial loss and eventual happiness in the wake of death.