Jan

2

When director Daldry, who provided the above-average “The Hours” (2002) and the slightly less winsome “The Reader” (2008) approached Sandra Bullock about doing this project, she was still reeling from the disclosures of her then-husband’s public indiscretions with multilevel tattoo’ed women, a swift divorce, and the adoption of a son. Luckily for her (if not for us), despite misgivings, she gave in, and the film we have at least gives her ample opportunity for incessant frowning and unrelenting sobbing.

Tom Hanks, as Thomas Schell, who also headlines this overlong mawkish and contrived effort, appears episodically for whole minutes at a time, with the aggregate not amounting to more than about a dozen minutes all told. John Goodman, playing a wise-acre NY doorman, is arch and spot on, but we get maybe two minutes of him onscreen. He is treated disrespectfully by the 9–year-old offspring of Hanks and Bullock, as mom Linda Schell, but sprat Oskar Schell (see? they are now an 'empty-schell family') is never rebuked for his unacceptable ill manners.

Kid Oskar (note the transformative “k” instead of the more expectable “c” in his name, a tell that the family is once-European, attested to obliquely by the grandpa we meet later on), is an amateur artist, inventor, Francophile and know-it-all peacenik who roams around searching for the lock to match a portentous key left by his father in a closet, inside a vase. The beloved Hanks, Papa Schell, goes to the World Trade Center on the fateful morning, and is no longer around to mentor his 250-watt donnish DNA in short pants.

The film, based on a soapy novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, does not win hearts if you’re looking for serious discussion or narrative about 9/11. The word terrorist is not mentioned even once, let alone the affiliation of perpetrators of the heinous act. In fact, "ELIC" subsumes that stark and still-hurting story for an unrealistic, pseudo-picaresque trek by the ever-scratchy protagonist, son of Hanks and Bullock, played by Thomas Horn. Maybe it’s me, but he never won my heart, and each succeeding scene irritated ever more. Foer is not a great writer, and this is not a very substantial film, though the principals and Jeffrey Wright, Viola Davis and particularly the always-great Maximilian von Sydow (doing a mute old man who has a remarkably coincidental role to play in the kid’s life) do their best.

What should and could have been a wrenching narrative about grief and reconciliation becomes instead the search for the owner of the key Oskar finds in a blue vase. On the basis of a ridiculous hunch that the word Black betokens a last name connected to the key, Osk follows up on all the Blacks in the NYC phonebook, well over a hundred, and a rainbow of the typically atypical. His dutiful mother apparently lets this attractive little genius wander at will around the five boroughs, first alone, then in the company of gramps, Von Sydow.

Horn is so irritating in Foer’s out-of-touch conceit that the kid reads Stephen Hawking as relaxation, yeah; is a brilliant artist the equal of Seymour Chwast; cuts school and lies because he can apparently do no wrong, saved from punishment for truancy and meretriciousness by a too-lax private school and mucho bucks, judging by the apartment we glimpse and its telling proximity to Central Park.

There are a few scenes toward the eventual closing credits that elicited tissues and waterworks by the too-credulous, but this is one ticket you can safely not buy, either for adult or child viewing.

Ms. Bullock might better have steered clear of Extremely Annoying and Incredibly Cloying. OK, cheap shot. The film however extends into what is, we all feel, sacred territory, and it does so in unbecomingly unrealistic and some might say untruthful ways.


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