Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Very Good but Not Great

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" has many special qualities, and it is a beautiful story. But something is off. A little something about the direction was off right from the beginning, and it never really righted itself.

Director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliott," "The Hours") just seemed unable to find his footing and clue into this family's experience well enough. But he got very close to something amazing.

The main character (who is on-screen about 90% of the time) is a Manhattan boy with Asperger's trying to process his grief after his beloved father's death in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The idea of trying to look at 9/11 through the eyes of a child who lost a parent is brilliant and profoundly humane, and we have Jonathan Safran Foer to thank for that (the author of the novel on which the film is based). To give that child Asperger's is also inspired. Foer is nothing if not ambitious as an artist.

First-time actor Thomas Horn, as the boy, does a good job, but there's a touch of phoniness and excessive sentiment to the portrayal. Too often I felt like I was watching an actor trying to pretend he had Asperger's. It just didn't feel real enough to really take off as a film, especially given the fact that the film is almost overly fixated on the boy.

Tom Hanks does a good job as the father, but he's killed off very early in the film. And he's a smidge too sentimental in his portrayal, too. The great Max Von Sydow does what he can as the boy's grandfather, but his character never speaks! Sandra Bullock is pretty flat as the boy's somewhat distant mother.

There were some raw and brutal moments, such as when the boy tells his mother that he wishes it was she who was in the World Trade Center that day, and not his father. Another is when the boy shows his grandfather photos from the Internet of people plummeting from the Towers. The boy is trying to make out if one of the falling bodies was his father.

But the film has no idea what to do with moments like that. They just get dropped in our laps, and then the movie moves onto something else. There's an odd unfinished quality to the film, and paradoxically an overcooked feeling to it.

It is certainly worth seeing, and the film hopefully will find a sizable audience. Its flaws are unmistakable, but so are its sublime and devastating moments, such as when the boy draws a picture of a man falling upward from the ground to the top of the Towers. Wrapping one's mind and heart around this boy's grief is enough to make you feel at times that you are breaking into pieces. We have all thought a lot about those who died in the Towers. Thank you, Jonathan Foer, for helping us direct some attention to the thousands of children who lost a parent that day. This film pays loving tribute to those children.