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How’s this for a trick question: which European actor received an Oscar nomination in 2012 for an entirely silent performance in a film that was also nominated for a best picture award?
The answer is Max von Sydow, for his role as the grandfather in Stephen Daldry’s film Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. (Jean Dujardin, nominated for the almost-silent film The Artist utters a single line at the end of that picture.)
[inset_left]It is not a 9/11 film at all, but simply an inward-looking celebration of America.[/inset_left]Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel of the same name, even down to that cute, curly ‘&’ in place of ‘and’. The film follows the attempts of eleven-year-old Oskar Schell to prolong the memory of his father, Thomas, following his death in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Von Sydow’s grandfather is silent because a terrible event has rendered him mute. The event, however, is not the Al-Qaeda attack that killed Thomas and devastated Oskar, but the long-ago fire bombing of Dresden during the Second World War.
There was a question Americans often voiced after the attacks of 9/11: namely, “Why do they hate us so much?” It is a dangerous question, in part because it supposes the victims were in some way to blame for the attack, and because in using the language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ it already assumed that a war is underway. There is nothing like believing a war has started for creating the conditions for a far more terrible conflict. Nevertheless, filmmakers attempted to answer this very question.
[caption id="attachment_55229311" align="alignleft" width="391" caption="A view of the World Trade Center towers on 11 September, 2001"]
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These films include Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005), Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs (2007), Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart (2007), and Oliver Stone’s account of the Bush presidency W (2008). In each, important people react forcibly and decisively to terrorism or its threat, only to wonder if their initial response was deeply flawed – if, in fact, they had repeated mistakes of the past to make a bad situation even worse. These films conclude with the thought that if ‘they’ hate us, perhaps it is because we continually do bad things, though only out of an excess of innocence. It is a deeply convoluted answer, though telling in its way. It maintains the innocence of the victims, while suggesting that in their innocence Americans are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their fathers.
At first sight, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is yet another 9/11 film about the dangers of naively repeating the mistakes of previous generations; in this case, it is specifically the mistakes of the grandfather, Schell. Oskar is the supreme innocent: his innocence is actually a medical condition. Oskar is borderline autistic, capable of focussing on details but unable to grasp the bigger picture. Will he turn out like his grandfather, so damaged by a past war that he was entirely absent from the life of Thomas, Oskar’s father? No: Oskar belatedly realises that Thomas was such a good father precisely because Schell was so bad. Thomas went to extraordinary lengths to help Oskar overcome the fears caused by his autism.
The title, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, does not refer primarily to the destruction of the World Trade Towers, but more generally to the city itself and how it is experienced by a boy who feels the smallest tremor as a cacophonic blow. After the death of Thomas, Oskar’s fears are raised to an unbearable pitch, but by following a treasure hunt that Thomas appears to have devised from beyond the grave, Oskar finally conquers these fears and averts the fate of his damaged grandfather.
Despite the Oscar nomination, Daldry’s film has been criticised as too sentimental, too pretentious, or simply too Oscar-orientated to be taken seriously. It is a beautiful film, powerfully acted by a very fine cast. It is also a three-handkerchief weepie: you will cry at the death of Thomas, at Oskar’s frustration with his quest, and at the resolution of the conflict between Oskar and his mother, Linda (Sandra Bullock). But it is flawed. The story is so laden with symbolism that, even as you are weeping, you will be trying to decode the message of innocence and guilt, and especially the relationship between the New World and the Old—innocent America and guilty Europe. If the film has a message, it is that America must overcome the deep psychological scars caused by the cruelties of the Europe they escaped. Oskar’s innocence is a kind of hard-won innocence, in that he is finally liberated from fear. In this sense, he is like everyone who regards America as new land created out of a desire for freedom. At this level, it is not a 9/11 film at all, but simply an inward-looking celebration of America.
If future generations want to understand the lives and motivations of the people who planned the attacks, there is Antonia Bird’s brilliant drama The Hamburg Cell (2004), or Chris Morris’s black comedy Four Lions (2010). Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) takes us inside the terrifying experience of the hijacking. The documentaries Fahrenheit 911 (2004) and Standard Operating Procedure (2008), from Michael Moore and Errol Morris respectively, show just why the concept of a ‘war on terror’ was so compromised and, in its own way, barbaric.
It is now more than a decade after 9/11, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close may very well be the last word on the subject. Does it teach us something new? In 2003, US Secretary of State for Defense Donald Rumsfeld condemned France and Germany for their refusal to join the invasion of Iraq as ‘Old Europe’. This is a film of a novel from that period, and it does show a belief in the ever-new and the ever-innocent, galvanised America, and how it has determined its relationship to the rest of the world.
