Dir. Stephen Daldry
Score: 6.5
Symbols can take any form, but the bigger they are, the more irrepressible they become: You want to represent an alcoholic’s descent? Try an ice cube; you want to tackle mortality? Look for an ice berg to hit the Titanic. In this way the horror of 9/11 is almost too easy to emulate. You had two of the largest, most signature buildings in the world reduced to crumbling dust within one excruciatingly bad morning, with an enormous cost of human life and, more universally for Americans, our sense of psychic well-being. To writers everywhere, it was like a bank of ripe flowers to a starving colony of bees. The problem then, is to find a way to scale the terror and misery down to a human level without dampening the genuine dreadfulness of the event. Jonathan Safran-Foer’s novel found an elegant solution by placing the full impact of that “worst day” on the tender psyche of a young, intellectual boy named Oskar, whose beloved father was lost in the towers, resulting in a cataclysm of the highest order.
Cinematically, it’s always difficult to translate a novel’s deep-seeded inner monologue — of which much of Safran-Foer’s book is composed — to the far more exterior sublimations and requirements of the big screen, but director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter Eric Roth have done an admirable job. Oskar (played by dynamite newcomer Thomas Horn) is prone to lengthy scientific discourse to explain his feelings — if the sun blew up this second, Earth would still bask in its light for 8 minutes he explains at one point, a connection he makes between his father’s death and the time it will take before Oskar’s memory of him will begin to fade out.
After his father’s dies, Oskar hoards all the artifacts about him he can, including the answering machine that contains his father’s last frantic phone calls home before the collapse of the tower, and keeps them as a makeshift shrine hidden away up in a cupboard in his room. Searching for more such items, he discovers a mysterious envelope containing a key and a single name, “black,” which leads him to methodically track down everyone in the city named “Black” in an attempt to track down the significance of the key, which he is convinced his father left him as a final quest. Oskar — borderline Aspergers, as he tells one adult — is terrified of many things, including loud noises, trains, bridges and crooked teeth, but such is the nature of his obsessive nature, he vows to disregard his assortment of terrors in order to solve the mystery. En route, he encounters many helpful and sympathetic adults, including the mysterious renter (Max von Sydow) who lives in the back room of his grandmother’s apartment, a man who only communicates via a small notepad he carries with him at all times.
The set up is certainly capable of being precious, but Oskar’s fierce intellectualism and the film’s reverence for its small protagonist’s intractability keeps it from becoming maudlin or unearned. In the film’s terrific first third, it feels as if Oskar’s unapproachable grief will be able to power the entire narrative, but, alas, it begins to second-guess itself, providing more and more stacked-up elements with which to propel itself forward. It never approaches the simple-minded hokiness of similar kid-on-a-quest film’s like North or Shyamalan’s Wide Awake, but it loses some of its power nonetheless. Still, the film features gutty performances, from Hanks and Horn, to von Sydow and Sandra Bullock, who plays Oskar’s grief-stricken mother with purposeful understatement. By the end, it might seem as if the film were merely dipping its toes into the giant ocean of grief that it started with, but it’s still a relief to see Oskar safely on the shore.
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