EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

Life is Beautiful Again

Directed by Stephen Daldry
Starring Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock

From the director of The Hours and Billy Elliot comes a remarkable film dealing with the small and tragic repercussions of an outrageous and grand scale catastrophe. Stephen Daldry constructs the tale of a middle class New York family coping with the aftermath of 9/11 through the eyes of Oskar (Horn), the precocious and brilliant nine year old savant who attempts to find meaning and sense through a spirited, playful and at times very painful adventure.

The film is an adaption of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel of the same name. Foer is perhaps best known for his watershed book Eating Animals, a superbly written work (which is chiefly responsible for me not having eaten a lamb chop in nearly a year) and the craft demonstrated by Foer in his earlier writing is shown throughout this genuinely uplifting and beautiful film. It is a very delicate piece which balances itself on tip toes and manages to tell its story without drowning in sentiment and delivers a powerfully emotional drama along the way. There is a bizarre and welcomed weightlessness to this picture which is really quite extraordinary considering its subject matter.

The performances are very strong across the board and the leads of Hanks and Bullock are especially moving, however, the chief gong has to go to the young Horn who manages to pull off a marvelous performance which is hardly ever reaching for anything and always seems to hit the right tone throughout the piece. The supporting cast, which in fact is everyone other than Horn, all put their own touches towards a very well shared vision of what the work seems to have set out to achieve.

The music here is also very effective, sweeping violins and kettle drums have been replaced with oboes, double bass and affected percussion, which gives the film a layer of a carnival-type, almost obscurest nature which works to heighten the journey on which Oskar takes the audience. This is easily Daldry’s greatest achievement as a director and is without doubt among the very best portraits of New York post 9/11. It is clearer than Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, more potent and emotional than the Adam Sandler vehicle Reign Over Me and it is softer and less idealised than Olivers Stone’s World Trade Center. It is a film about loss, grief, total despair and finding reason and meaning, both in spite of the madness as well as because of it.

The film’s power is in its ability to actually answer some of these enormous questions it asks. The setup is superb and it somehow manages to maintain its own magnetic energy until the final frame. As a viewer I was anticipating the inevitable disappointment that usually comes with strong starts but this picture is something quite different indeed. It hits all its marks, it’s constructed nearly perfectly and shows the world for what it is, a place filled with very loving and warm hearted people capable of remarkable love and enduring strength, strength which is drawn from the love of others and strength which is gathered together at those times when there seems to be little left to go around. It’s very good, it’s Life Is Beautiful Good, it’s Casablanca good, it’s Incredibly and Extremely good.

_ADAM MORRIS