Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

We just rented Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and I remember reading a bunch of reviews when the movie came out being hyper critical of the fact that the tragedy is 9/11 and how it could have been any tragedy that took the kid's father, how the movie is some emotional father son shallow hollow whatever movie.*

It's not.

The movie has nothing to do with the kid's relationship with his dad and everything to do with 9/11.  This is not a movie about a kid dealing with his dad's death, it's about a nation trying to make sense of the events of 9/11 - how everybody searches for a key (could we be more obvious in our metaphors?) to make sense of why these things happen, but the truth is...we really don't make sense of it.  We just move on.  We don't make sense of the tragedies in our lives (any of them - any of the losses that the characters in the movie experience) but we then pick up the pieces of our lives and move ahead and make sense of right now.

Yes, the movie may become over-sentimental, okay, I get it.  And the dad is a freaking saint (really, not a single scene of him doing ANYthing wrong?)**.  Yeah, the kid is weird and the old guy doesn't talk and there's loose ends and it's messy - and it's also sort of all tidied up in the end.

But it's not just about relationships - or, rather, it's not just about these relationships - it's about all our relationships and how messed up they are and how broken they are and how we all experience loss and try to make sense of the unreasonable and the unexplainable...

And so it was a springboard for us, again, to talk to the girls about that day.  Rachel was almost one, Elie wouldn't be born for almost two more years...  And in the safety of our home we could talk during the movie - and we could talk about how we dealt with - and tried to make sense of - what happened on 9/11 and the months and years after...

So, yeah, maybe this isn't the best movie - I don't know, maybe it's not even a good movie - but I think the themes are deeper than a lot of reviewers wanted admit, maybe even wanted to pay attention to at first blush.

If you've seen it, watch it again in a few years.  If you haven't seen it, check it out.  Worth watching...








*Here are some reviews: The Guardian, The Independent NY Times None of whom really seemed to get it, in my opinion... Especially the NY Times... go figure.


**Admittedly, this is told from kid's perspective - his remembering of his dad - so we pretty much do only remember the good stuff, or at least that's pretty much what I'm choosing to remember about my dad 20+ years gone now...