These days, the Internet is in a tizzy because Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close got nominated for an Oscar despite garnering a large amount of bad reviews.
Well, whatever.
The thing about movie reviews is that (and the same could be said of book reviews, although you’d better believe I’ll still be writing a few of them here, because I read a lot of books and I like to write about them too, like it or not) they are not a reliable indicator, at least for me, of whether I’ll like or dislike a movie. I saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last weekend for a couple of reasons: 1) I’m a fan of Jonathan Safran Foer’s books; I liked it in book form and 2) I saw a preview and I thought, “I’d like to see that, especially because I like Tom Hanks.” I didn’t read any reviews until after we saw the movie.
The film opens with a few long moments of clear, blue sky. We all know that the day of 9/11 was as clear and blue as they come. And then the camera shows something that resolves into a man, falling. At first you see only his shoe, and then his pant leg whipping in the wind; his face isn’t shown, but there are various close-ups of him. And of course you instantly know that it is a falling man or perhaps The falling man. It’s a movie set against the backdrop of the aftermath of 9/11, but it begins with an iconic image from that day as moving picture. Some lady in the theater said, “Oh my god,” when she realized what it was on the screen.
What follows is the story of Oskar Schell, whose father died in the towers on 9/11. A year after his death, Oskar finds a key in a mysterious envelope in his father’s closet and goes on a quest through New York City to find the lock that the key belongs to. Along the way he meets a lot of different people and is ultimately joined by the Renter, a mute man who rents a room from his grandmother in her apartment across the way.
Some critics say that the movie tugged too unabashedly at the audience’s heartstrings. Whether it was too unabashed I don’t really know, but yes, full disclosure, I cried. Oskar’s dad, Thomas Schell, is played by Tom Hanks. (Full disclosure: I love Tom Hanks). He leaves several messages on the answering machine from the World Trade Center during the movie. I cried about those. One scene shows the call he places to his wife, played by Sandra Bullock. He tells her, calmly, that he’s in the World Trade Center on the 105th floor. “You find a stairwell, and you come home,” she says. Her character, unlike the audience, doesn’t know that the buildings are going to come down, and doesn’t know that the 105th floor was too high for stairwells and too low for helicopters. I cried then, too.
Anyway, I don’t mind a good cry at the movies, and maybe it is a testament to my unsophistication when it comes to “film” that makes me an easy target for so-called unabashed heart-string pulling. But afterward, my main opinion was that the movie had been basically true to the book, although there wasn’t time for some of the side-plots, as can be expected in a movie. The character of Oskar was a little more brusque than I remembered from the book, but (duh) not everything is always the same.
Did the movie portray parts of 9/11? Well, yes. There were many flashbacks to Oskar’s experience of the day, which meant that we don’t see a lot of news footage, except what Oskar sees on their home television. But the movie doesn’t linger much on these aspects, except to illustrate some of Oskar’s thoughts. It is, after all, the story of Oskar’s grief, and his grief was caused by 9/11. The vast majority of the film is through his eyes. And I’m down with that.
So, what does it mean that most reviewers are outraged that it was nominated for Best Picture, and a lot of them called it “saccarine,” and a lot of them said that it was just wrong to “exploit 9/11 for entertainment”? Not much.
I just don’t agree. I thought the acting was pretty good, and what, are we supposed to ignore that this thing happened? Pretend that there are no stories to be told that might be set against this event? I think not. Movies can be a way to face things, even if it’s not in a totally direct way.
Movie reviews, like reviews of anything, are always reflective of an individual’s opinion. What else could they be? If I decided which books to read and which movies to see based only on reviews, I’d probably never see or read any. Every movie has some big fans and some people who hate it. So does every book. So does every single product on Amazon.
This is one of the great trade-offs of the Internet. We’re surrounded with everyone’s reviews, but most of the time they’re completely irrelevant to our personal choices. I like, and even love, a lot of books and movies that critics revile. Does this mean that I am not a sophisticated (or snobby) peruser of media, or that I am easily manipulated by emotional scenes? Maybe. But does it matter if I liked the movies and books? Nope.
My strategy: see the movies and read the books anyway. Then read the reviews later.