For quite sometime now, we have been witness to an ad campaign for the movie Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, a film that centers on an eleven year old boy’s attempt to cope with the loss of his father, who was murdered in one of the World Trade Towers on 09/11.
From looking the ads, one gets the feeling that this would be a sad, but heartwarming movie, but the looks here are very deceiving.
In a one her recent columns for the New York Post, Andrea Peyser, who saw the film, gives it a scathing review. A highlight:
This movie tells lies.
It stars a weird 11-year-old overprivileged Manhattan boy, Oskar Schell (“Jeopardy” whiz kid Thomas Horn), who’s afflicted with a form of autism, likely Asperger’s syndrome. His condition is presented as nobly as the disability of the John Nash character in “A Beautiful Mind” — minus the brilliance and charm.
The schmaltzy flick is a kind of “Rocky” for an entitled, self-absorbed and self-mutilating boy. Except the triumph the child experiences is over moviegoers, who plunk down significant bucks to see this rot.
The movie concerns the boy’s quixotic attempt to hold on to his dad (Tom Hanks), who was murdered in the Trade Center. Yes, I wrote “murder.” But you won’t hear that word uttered by anyone in the film, because 9/11 is presented here as a kind of cosmic accident. Like lightning.
The message isn’t “love one another.” It’s “sh-t happens.”
The kid spends months combing New York, from borough to borough, searching for a mysterious lock that, he’s convinced, can be opened only by a key he believes his dad left behind for him to find.
The horrid boy curses out his doorman, played by an underutilized John Goodman (“Succotash my ball sac”), and cruelly abuses his mom (a weepy Sandra Bullock).
Appearing in every last frame of the film, the kid becomes the movie’s only identifiable terrorist. He tells his defeated mom, “I wish it were you in the building instead of him.”
“So do I,” she replies.
Nothing is spared in the quest for emotional blackmail, cheap thrills and a naked ploy for an Oscar.
In flashbacks, people dying in the towers are heard on the telephone — coughing, gasping and ripping the phone from the hands of one another.
Bodies fall from the buildings, however briefly. This unbearably brave act — humans choosing their method of dying — was too painful to dramatize. Until now.
But the most outrageous falsehood promoted in the film is the thing it leaves out. The word “terrorist” is consciously never said. Nor is “murderers,” “butchers” or “Muslim extremists.”
In a climactic scene, Bullock tells her son that 9/11 “made no sense.” This is the biggest lie of all.
For 9/11 made perfect sense. It was an act of barbarity committed by people bent on destroying this city, this nation.
Denying this is worse than insensitive. It glamorizes reality.
Families of 9/11 victims have uniformly rejected the film without seeing it.
“It’s all about the almighty dollar. These people would sell their mother down the river,” Rosemary Cain, who lost her firefighter son, George, said of the filmmakers.
“Everyone in the buildings was a hero.”
The movie ends in true Hollywood style. The boy, however improbably, finds the lock he seeks. But it has nothing to do with him or his father. Just another cosmic accident. The mother and child, even more improbably, come to terms with their grief and decide to get along. Until next time.
The Storyline for IMDB reads:
A nine-year-old amateur inventor, Francophile, and pacifist searches New York City for the lock that matches a mysterious key left behind by his father, who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
That’s a dead giveaway right there in that one sentence.
Could All Of This Be One Explanation?
Where are the conservative filmmakers when it comes to this subject? We don’t need big budget films about 09/11. I’m sure there are some out there with good ideas, so the more important question becomes: Where are the conservatives with money to finance such filmmakers? Why are they such fools [I've got Ladd Ehlinger's phone number if you want it]?
