Making peace

January 20, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

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. Dad’s fanciful quests, “reconnaissance expeditions,” send the kid into Central Park in search of New York’s lost “sixth borough,” and the like. Oskar must meet and chat with all sorts of strangers to complete his mission.

But those missions might have come to an end the day his mom (Sandra Bullock) buried “an empty box.” Oskar’s morbid visions of his father tumbling through the air threaten to overwhelm his memories of Dad. Then, he stumbles across a key in an envelope, which he takes as his last expedition, a years-long quest, trying to find that one New Yorker named “Black” who has the lock that key might fit.

Director Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”) got an insufferable performance out of young Mr. Horn and fine work out of Davis, Von Sydow and especially Bullock.

The mysteries aren’t that mysterious and some may have a hard time embracing its abrasive hero. But “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” doesn’t just use 9/11 as a backdrop and emotional ploy. The event is a protagonist in the film. And there is just enough distance from the event, and just enough heart to this story, to help us all with something a decade hasn’t brought us any closer to understanding.