Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Stephen Daldry’s film of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel arrived with a promise on its poster: that it was not a story about 11 September but a story about every day after. That describes Eric Roth’s screenplay better than the finished film, which puts the towers on screen early and returns to them whenever it needs help. Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) finds a key in his dead father’s wardrobe and decides that somewhere in New York there is a lock that will explain everything. It is a good idea for a children’s book, and the film runs 129 minutes.

Horn is the reason to keep watching. He plays Oskar as a small, brisk, literal boy who lists what frightens him, bridges, the subway, loud noises, and rattles a tambourine at his hip to keep the panic down. The trouble is that Roth gives him a voiceover explaining each thing he does as he does it, the key, the search, the lie he tells his mother each morning, so a character built on not saying things spends two hours saying them. Tom Hanks, in flashback, is easy and warm as the father who sets him expeditions in Central Park, and the film is at its best when the two of them are talking.

We were got at once. Oskar has kept the answering machine from the morning his father died, with the messages Thomas left from the tower, and he plays them alone. Hanks’s voice on the tape is level and ordinary, saying he is fine. Horn’s face does nothing at all. Alexandre Desplat’s score, for once, stays out. It moved us more than we expected, and then we noticed the film had built its whole plot around that machine and around what it is holding back from us, and the feeling soured into resentment. It is the only scene in the film that trusts the tape to do the work.

Everywhere else it pushes. Desplat’s piano and strings sit under nearly every scene and swell a bar before anyone says anything sad, so we are ready. Chris Menges lights New York in a soft, clean, even glow, and every door Oskar knocks on across the five boroughs opens onto a stranger who is kind to him. Claire Simpson cuts the visits into montages of thresholds and faces until the Blacks of New York become a slideshow of good people. K.K. Barrett gives the Schells a flat full of books and warm wood, with the father’s wardrobe kept like a shrine. It is all handsome.

The supporting cast is better than its parts. Viola Davis, as Abby Black, cries in a doorway while a marriage ends in the next room, a minute of adult mess the film hurries past. Max von Sydow plays a lodger in Oskar’s grandmother’s flat who does not speak, answers with a notepad and with Yes and No inked on his palms, and joins the search; it is the one device the film leaves alone, and he is dry and sad and funny in it. Jeffrey Wright arrives late and is good in a scene we will not describe. Sandra Bullock spends most of the film at the edge of the frame as a mother who cannot reach her son, then is handed its best scene, which we also will not describe. She plays it small.

Daldry made Billy Elliot in 2000, and it is the fair comparison: a boy in a house where a parent has gone. There the loss was a fact the boy lived around while he did something else. Here it is a project, with a map, a list and a rule for every borough, and every clue Oskar finds is another scene of him being clever rather than sad. Most critics were as unpersuaded as we were; those who were moved were moved by Horn, and we see why.

It is long for a search with one answer. The 12A is right: there is nothing here a twelve-year-old cannot watch, and a fair amount one might see through. If you want to be made to cry on a wet Sunday afternoon it will do that, because it has been built for nothing else. We can see who it was made for, and they were owed something less tidy.