Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Seven magazine review When Oskar lists everything he's terrified by post-9/11 - the people, the sirens, the surviving buildings - it's a deft sketch of the prevailing climate of fear. But sketches are all we get. With the novel's already episodic narrative broken down further for easier consumption, the film can't even begin to convey loss on any scale. The adult leads do decent work in the circumstances. It's not inappropriate shorthand to cast cuddly Tom Hanks as a composite of all those fathers lost in the attacks; and, as Oskar's mother, Sandra Bullock again proves herself subtler than her material, crafting in a few short scenes a portrait of a widow who remains mother enough to notice her son's plight. Yet too much rests on the untried Horn's shoulders, and he's too eager and poised to appear truly distressed, rather than merely showbiz-distressed. Oskar carries a tambourine around with him as an emotional crutch: I feel you should be warned. Such crutches abound. Those flickers of raw grief Daldry permits, such as Oskar howling his wish that his mother had died instead, are packaged safely, with soft lighting and tinkly piano, then a final round of hugs and thank-you notes. While nowhere near catastrophic, the film's default tack, a respectful distance from the events depicted, results in something far less immediate and vivid than its own title suggests. Oskar eventually turns the Twin Towers into a neatly wrapped pop-up book, but the Extremely Loud experience is closer to staring at those soothingly banal art-works tacked to therapists" office walls.