The Autism News | English

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Like Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” the new drama “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” focuses on a boy who’s lost his father. Both of the late dads were tinkerers, of a sort, and both leave a puzzle behind.

There, the similarities pretty much end, although both films are haunted by death and destruction. “Hugo” retains its faith in magic, especially the kind made by the imagination. In “Extremely Loud,” magic is hard to find, and imagination leads our hero down a rabbit hole with no Wonderland on the Other Side.

As everyone knows by now, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is A Very Serious Feature About 9/11, although the tragedy of the World Trade Center is barely touched upon – a McGuffin really.

Its real theme is loss, and how we cope with it.

Our hero is Oskar, a precocious but nerdy Manhattan 9-year-old with so many phobias and crochets he makes Woody Allen look like Daniel Craig.

Played with intensity by Thomas Horn (who resembles a gangly young Matthew Modine), Oskar tells us he was once tested for Asperger’s syndrome. Like many Asperger’s patients, he’s obsessed by numbers and tends to focus on his interests to the exclusion of all else, including his long-suffering mother (Sandra Bullock).

Oskar mourns for his dad, and why not, since he’s played, in flashbacks, by Tom Hanks as whimsical, caring and nurturing. Dad, a jeweler, died in the Twin Towers in what Oskar calls “The Worst Year.”

Oskar can’t accept his mother’s solution: a memorial service with an “empty box … like he was a goldfish.” But he can’t let go of his dad’s presence.

To break down Oskar’s shyness, Dad would send him on “reconnaissance missions,” often involving a mythical “Sixth Borough” of New York that floated away to sea.

One day, fumbling through his dad’s stuff, Oskar finds a small envelope with the word “BLACK” written on the outside. Inside, he finds a small key, the kind that goes to a post office box or safety-deposit box.

Is this a final reconnaissance mission? Oskar quickly decides, for obscure reasons, that “Black” is a name, not a color, so he sets out to contact everyone with the surname Black in the New York City phone book – more than 400 in all.

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