"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close": review and commentary

My husband and I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on Monday night.  Seth has been wanting to see it for a while.  I'd seen the advertisements but I hadn't paid enough attention to even read the synopsis, so I didn't know what it was about.  My mistake.  This is a movie that is worth seeing in every way. 

Not only is it about a poignant story that every American over the age of twenty should be able to appreciate in some way, but it's also beautiful, realistic, and personal.  Thomas Horn, who plays the main character and narrative voice, is completely engrossing as a boy with indeterminate Asperger's  Syndrome who is trying to make sense of the death of his father, the only person who really understood him, in the Twin Towers on 9/11.  He's supported by an array of award-winning actors and actresses and led by a bittersweet script that keeps him personal  even when the obsessive and anti-social parts of his disorder are abrasive and hard to deal with.  The photography captures the dirt and hustle of everyday, industrial New York City and sometimes manages to make it beautiful, and the story has hope, even though we know from the beginning that his quest is pretty hopeless.    

I knew the movie was going to be gut-wrenching when the first shot was a picture of a man's dress shoe, upside down and apparently falling through a clear blue sky.  The only sound was the deafening whistling of the wind.  It was like a kick in the gut.  We all saw the people jumping out of the burning offices, but how many of us thought about what it would feel to freefall to the earth?  What would it have been like in those moments before death?  Apparently the author or the director had given it some thought.   Then twenty minutes in, I realized that Seth was sniffing, and I was sniffing.  Never outright tears, but lots of sniffing, and the sniffling continued through the whole movie. 

Of course, watching the movie was emotional.  We might not have been at the scene of 9/11 or lost anyone to it, but we experienced it.  It felt like our guts were ripped out that morning as we watched the towers fall and the last survivors stagger out in a cloud of dust.  We watched for weeks, praying for yet another survivor to be uncovered in the rubble.  We cheered the stories of heroism with tears in our eyes and wept openly for the families bereaved.  9/11 was one of the touchstones of our generation, like watching the Berlin Wall come down (I was 9 when that happened.  I got to stay up late to watch.), only in the opposite way.   The fall of the Berlin Wall put us on top of the world.  9/11 brought us back down again.

When 9/11 happened, I was in a van, driving to a ghost town in the middle of the Iowa cornfields.  My writing 201 class was focusing on setting, I think, and Dr. Schaap always took his 201 classes out to this place.  We listened to the radio reports on the way out and on the way back, and it was like time and space had been transcended because we were so close to what was happening in New York City.  In between we sat among the tombstones of people who had died 150 years ago, most taken too soon, at least by our standards.  It was a kind of anchor, I suppose, to remember that we all die, and that death is often a tragedy.  Even 150 years couldn't really make sense of it, but it could put it in context. 

I think what Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close does is add some context to the loss of 9/11, to remind us that fire and hatred aren't the only way we can lose someone, to show us the basic human relationships that were interrupted and the relationships that were reforged.   It wasn't entirely enjoyable, but it was a good movie.