彩色泡泡糖

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Director: Stephen Daldry

Writers: Eric Roth (screen play), Jonathan Safran Foer (novel)

Stars: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock

First of all, I need to point out how special this director is. Among his several works, there are "Billy Elliot", "The Hours", and "The Reader", which I had the pleasure to see and enjoy in the past years.

All these films have something in common: people who watched them either totally love them, or they just hate them. Actually I think this one would be the same. I believe it is because of the way the director approaches the subject, and the tempo of the movie is usually very slow to a degree that some people would get unconfortable. 

This movie deals with a boy (Oskar Schell) whose father (Tom Hanks) was killed in 911 an year ago, leaving one mysterious key in a blue vase. The boy was determined to find the lock that matches the key, to solve the mystery, just like what his father had been doing with him before the tragedy. He actually started an adventure, and to excecute this mission he had to conquer his fear towards the strangers, unfamiliar environments, public transportation, and during the journey he listened to many stories from other people, and even found his own grandfather who he had never met before. And most importantly, at the end of this journey, he was totally surprised at how deep his mother (Sandra Bullock) was engaged in helping him complete the mission, and how much she understood him. Until then he never doubted that his father was the only one in the world that really understood him and could be communicated with.

Oskar felt lonely, lost, and grieved at the loss of his father, and would do anything to find a way to extend the connection with his father. In the end, he finally found a way to let go of his father, found condelence to his grief and courage to keep moving on.

I like this movie a lot, as the director could have made it very dramatic and sappy, but he didn't. Meanwhile, the whole story is told in the point of view of a nine-year-old boy whose actually is pretty peculiar. He is not sophisticated in social life or in revealing his own thoughts to anyone but his dad, and sometimes when his feelings becomes overwhelming, he gets emotional and that scares people around him. I wouldn't say it's a flawed character, nonetheless it's not the perfect character to attract sympathy of the audience. It takes more empathy to understand him, and his actions.

And I am really awed by Sandra Bullock's performace. Her scenes are few but every single scene is amazing. I can totally feel the trauma and ordeal Linda Schell's been sufferring and how helpless she is toward the relationship between Oskar and her. She doesn't do many movements nor speak a lot, but I just can feel everything through her eyes. This is a completely different character from Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side, and I think she handles both parts perfectly.

In one scene, Oskar was having a fight with Linda when Linda desperately told Oskar: "It (the tragedy) just doesn't make sense." I think that's the most important messsage from the movie: Most of the time life just doesn't make sense, and we just have to get through these unhappy challenges. That's what Linda does: to survive the loss of her husband, and to break the ice between Oskar and her. Even though neither incident is fair or makes any sense.