If you remember my discussion in this post, I've decided to go in reverse order through all the best picture nominees I've never seen ... all 201 of them. Starting with 2011's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
If you remember also in that post, I said I would probably not write about each one -- just because it was a best picture nominee doesn't mean I have something profound to say about it -- but that I would at least start out by writing about the first one. And that I would try to get to it soon to strike while the iron is hot.
That strike occurred four days after I put up the post, Monday night, when I had the shakes with what felt like COVID. Seemed like a good night to do some "homework."
(I never tested positive for COVID, despite taking four RAT tests, even though my younger son did in fact test positive. He's now testing negative and we are all fine, though we did spend the past week isolating.)
I remember there had been a lot of backlash against Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the book of which I had read and quite liked. Movies about 9/11 -- this was released ten years and three months after that day -- have always flirted with being topical in a way that was either too confronting or too self-important. In fact, the only one I can remember receiving universal plaudits was United 93, and with good reason.
Stephen Daldry's film, like the Jonathan Safran Foer book on which it was based, takes place a year (or two?) after 9/11, where the main character's father (played by Tom Hanks) died in one of the World Trade Center buildings. Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) and his father used to like going on treasure hunts, kind of like what we would now call geo tracking, and Oskar, in a vain last attempt to connect with his father, blankets the city of New York trying to find the lock for a key he finds inside a vase that belonged to his father. His only clue is a name on the envelope: "Brown."
It's oscar (Oskar) material for sure, and it is also confronting for sure. Horn gives a really good performance for an actor his age, but it is also a pretty discomfiting one -- he's an eccentric kid, who would have likely made us uncomfortable even if he weren't processing the death of his father. His preternatural intelligence combined with some on-the-spectrum personality traits makes him hard to look at at times. It's not either a strength or a weakness of the film, just confronting.
Foer's work often feels like it is biting off more than it can chew, which works for me in the film adaptation of Everything is Illuminated but not quite as well in this. This film could have been called Everything Everywhere All at Once, as it deals with a lot. It assigns a sort of cosmic significance to everything and doesn't have much of a sense of humor, which would be possible even in a 9/11 movie if it had just adjusted its perspective a bit. The product that's there is definitely good if the alternative is to call it bad, but I did feel myself resisting it a bit. Final verdict: three stars.
In this series I think it makes sense to issue a judgment about each film to determine if the best picture nomination was warranted. In this case I would say no, since a three-star movie is pretty well short of that minimum threshold. But I wasn't offended by it and I was glad to see it. Could have used a bit more Sandra Bullock and given us a more interesting resolution with the character played by Max von Sydow, who accompanies Oskar on many of his Saturday afternoon excursions around the five burroughs.
Ray will be the next movie in this series at some point in the future, at which point that will clear all the best picture nominees from the 21st century.
No comments:
Post a Comment