Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and sure to divide

A bright, socially awkward boy tries to make sense of 9/11 and find some closure with the father he lost on what he calls "the worst day" in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close."


The film, based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, is a sometimes tearful remembrance of that day and the lives it ended or forever disrupted. And while it flirts with the preciousness that comes with Foer novels ("Everything is Illuminated"), it is engrossing and emotional in ways no other 9/11 drama has managed.


Oskar (Thomas Horn), our hero and narrator, is a tween who was once tested for Asperger’s Syndrome, but those tests were "inconclusive." He’s a loner who thinks and thinks and thinks; his sympathetic dad (Tom Hanks) had figured out a way to bring him out of his shell.


It’s a combination fable/adventure yarn that, I suspect, is not meant to taken on face value; most of it’s filtered, after all, through the eyes and imagination of a grieving child who’s alternately annoying and endearing.


That’s 11-year-old Oskar Schell, a socially awkward New Yorker with more than his share of manias and fears. Asperger’s syndrome is suspected, he says, but as he informs a total stranger: “Tests were inconclusive.”


After his dad (saintly Tom Hanks) dies on 9/11, Oskar tries to make sense of something that's impossible to make sense of.


So he embarks on a quest to every corner of New York, and if you care to join him on that adventure — I did, the moment he packed an Israeli gas mask and tambourine to go with his cell phone and map — you’ll likely found “Extremely Loud” incredibly affecting, a multi-hanky story of loss and guilt and connection, expertly made.


If you don’t? You’ll resist the film’s manipulations (and don’t all films manipulate?), perhaps quite vocally.