Stephen Daldry
Molto forte, incredibilmente vicino

The reaction to a loss, to a traumatic event, has more or less always been the subject of psycho-analytical facets on which treaties and manuals have been written not only for the exclusive use and consumption of the medical arts but also to accompany those who suffer a bereavement or who survive something so devastating that it prevents them from returning to the "normality" of common life. To process the grief, to not pretend nothing happened, to continue living in full acceptance of what happened, to use the experience and pain to improve one's future life, to filter hatred, the sense of revenge, and anger and transform all of it into love for others and positivity; yes, fine... whatever helps you move forward is welcome if it improves the quality of your life and the quality of your thoughts. But there is always this impression of not being capable, of being inevitably guilty regardless of the responsibilities of others... as if every misfortune that befalls us could have somehow been avoided or mitigated or made less painful, as if saying just one word or picking up a phone at the right moment could have made everything less devastating and tragic. If, then, one is a child, everything is unfortunately even more complex: children have a different perspective, they ask why, a different "why," a simpler "why," if we will... and if one then is the child of a wonderful father who one morning on September 11, 2001, in New York, leaves the house to go to work and never comes back, then things can also spiral out of control. 

"The worst day" is now in the past for Oskar; the months have gone by, and he, at nine years old, is still looking for a reason, not the same one that almost everyone in the world looked for; he's only interested in understanding why all of a sudden his father is no longer there, he's interested in understanding how he can still communicate with him and feel him close, but above all, he wants with all his heart not to give up and to keep looking for the meaning of what happened in his life, still too immature and perhaps too sensitive to accept unconditionally (as those older than him tell him to do) such a massive upheaval.

So Oskar finds a key among his father's things and decides that only by discovering the contents of what that key opens, he might find a meaning to everything.

The story continues with frantic searches, angry outbursts, and memories in a sort of odyssey of growth that will lead young Oskar to grow and to know and relate to people who, in one way or another, will give him something of themselves to help him not so much in his material search but in that inner journey of "acceptance" and "processing" of pain. 

Stephen Daldry is a courageous director, as already seen in two of his best-known works (The Hours and The Reader), and the stories he chooses are not among the easiest to reproduce in images, so with this "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," things proved even more challenging, on one hand, because the 9/11 theme is still seen as a sort of taboo by American cinema, on the other because representing it all through the eyes of a child could have been rendered so sentimentally sweet and cloying.

Undoubtedly, he could count on solid production support and a cast certainly up to the task (such as the superb performance of Max Von Sydow in the role of a "mysterious" old mute man who helps the young man in his search) and on the fact that Eric Roth's screenplay (quite faithful to the book) manages to recreate with skill every psychological element of each character. For this, a generic applause should be given to the operation itself considered from a strictly cinematic point of view, yet, in the end, what convinces less is paradoxically the lack of poetic nature, the strange feeling of coldness that envelops it all. I've never gotten along well with films whose sole purpose is to make you sob loudly, and I don't think this is the case, but there's a premonition that the direction sought in certain episodes is precisely that of syrupiness and easy tears; without being misunderstood, undoubtedly some scenes are nevertheless of strong intensity (Oskar's "dialogue"/ "confession" with his elderly friend, the final confrontation between the boy and his mother) but what remains at the end of the movie is still the conviction of having witnessed yet another tear-jerking film. 

From another perspective, however, which is extremely subjective, one is wrapped up by a somewhat uncomfortable sadness and emotion precisely because it's so distant from poetic nature and so close to acceptance (in the end, just like for the young protagonist).

At least that's how it was for me.