Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Director: Stephen Daldry
Starring: Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell, Tom Hanks as Thomas Schell, Sandra Bullock as Linda Schell, Zoe Caldwell as Oskar’s Grandmother, Viola Davis as Abby Black, Max von Sydow as The Renter
Rating: PG-13
Released: Dec. 25, 2011 (wide release Jan. 20, 2012)
Nine-year-old Oskar has always been a little…different.
His brain is unquestionably nimble: He’s a self-proclaimed musician, pacifist, entomologist and oxymoronist, among other things. His father, Thomas Schell, sends him scampering across New York City on elaborate scavenger hunts—asking him, for instance, to find clues of New York’s Mythical Sixth Borough. He’ll never tell Oskar just what he’s looking for; he only asks that he look.
However, the boy is also scared of almost everything—from a bridges to trains to old people. When Thomas dies in the attacks of 9/11, all the boy’s anxieties are exacerbated. Losing a father is unimaginably difficult, but when your father is also your best friend and the only one in the world who seems to understand you…well, the loss is enough to crush far stronger people than Oskar. The boy pinches himself until he bleeds, listening to his father’s voice on an answering machine he’s hidden from his mother.
Then one afternoon, Oskar summons the courage to go into his father’s old closet and finds there a small envelope with “Black” written on it, and inside is a key. Oskar’s heart leaps: It’s another scavenger hunt—one last quest his father has given him. He decides to set out and search for the lock the key belongs to, and swears that he’ll find it—even if he has to talk to every person named Black in New York.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a poignant scavenger hunt in itself: a story of loss and discovery, of secret treasures and hidden strength. Through his journey, we can learn something about ourselves and how we should treat other people.
Thomas instituted Oskar’s hunts largely to help push the boy out of his problematic comfort zone: He wanted to force Oskar to explore, to talk to other people and always to think about the wider world around him. When Thomas dies and Oskar undertakes this citywide hunt on his own, it’s a far braver thing than perhaps we can conceive. It’s a great reminder that we all need to be pushed. It’s only when we’re uncomfortable that we really have opportunity to explore and grow and become better people.
Oskar has calculated, down to the day, how long his search will take—budgeting for food stops and bathroom breaks and a handful of minutes for interviews. He quickly learns that, as he says, people aren’t like numbers that can be packaged neatly in time budgets, but letters—and these letters always want to form stories. None of them can help Oskar with his key, but they comfort him when they hear his story—and he, in turn, helps comfort them through their own losses and hurts. Sometimes we all, as Oskar, can treat people as numbers, not letters; when we do, we miss the chance to help them and for them to help us.
Questions:
1. Oskar’s scared of lots of things, but one of his biggest fears is disappointing his parents. At times, that fear seems to paralyze him, while at others it forces him to take unexpected and dangerous chances. Does that fear of disappointment work the same way in our lives, too? Do we sometimes hold back because we’re worried we might fail? Do we sometimes do something difficult because it’d make our moms or dads or even God happy?
2. While the scavenger hunt helps Oskar feel closer to his dad, it seems to separate him from his mother. He doesn’t tell her about the hunt, doing it mostly on his own. Later we learn Oskar’s mom was keeping an eye on him the entire time. How would the movie have been different had Oskar communicated with his mother from the very beginning?
3. On his travels, Oskar runs into a woman who reminds him that “every day is a miracle.” “I don’t believe in miracles,” Oskar says, to which the woman says, “Finding the lock this [key] fits would be a miracle.” Do you look for miracles in your life? Do you find them?
