- Surprise, I haven’t read the book!
- I don’t usually read movie reviews by legitimate critics since if I want to see a movie, I will see it regardless. I occasionally check out Rotten Tomatoes afterwards, though, when I have a feeling something might be polarizing and was actually incredibly surprised that this is currently at 53% for positive critic ratings on RT right now. Is this movie really that terrible? People seem to be taking exception to what they’re calling emotional pornography and an exploitation of September 11 but I don’t see it, at least not in the extreme they want me to.
Oskar’s implausibly perfect father Thomas (played by Tom Hanks, thus he is impossible to hate) is one of the people who died in the towers in September 11. Naturally, Oskar is having trouble coming to grips with this (for a whole host of reasons, not all of which are necessarily related to the trauma itself). I can see how aspects of this could be emotionally manipulative or exploitative (the slow revelation of Thomas’ answering machine messages from the day he died, the photos Oskar prints of people jumping from the buildings) but really I think they have far less to do with any emotional short-cuts the film might want to take and far more to do with Oskar’s own issues. I think it’s clear that I’m very sensitive to schmaltz and cloying sentimentality and attempts to elicit very specific emotional responses, and at no point during this film did I feel terribly manipulated. I mean, have any of these people seen Remember Me or World Trade Center? Come on. You could do a lot worse in the burgeoning 9/11 genre.
- The other hilarious snippet of a review I read was from someone who found Oskar obnoxious. No shit. They seemed to be under the impression that he was supposed to be adorable and likeable and I have no idea how anyone can come to this conclusion. This is a kid who has many undiagnosed issues and he’s not meant to be precocious, he’s meant to be a child struggling with not just the death of a parent but with a myriad of other triggers that magnify his attempts to deal with his grief. Right out of the gate I thought “This kid has Aspberger’s” and so I laughed when he told Abby that he’d been tested and that the results were “inconclusive”.
I have a friend who works with kids on the autism spectrum and one of the things she hates most is parents who won’t accept a diagnosis (“My child could never have autism”) and thus their refusal to acknowledge this prevents the kid from getting the help they need. Evidently it never occurred Oskar’s parents to get a second opinion, because ultimately their way of dealing with it is for Thomas to come up with seriously elaborate adventure games designed to take Oskar out of his comfort zone and force him to meet the world head on. On the one hand, Thomas’ approach is admirable beacuse it allows him to form a very deep and engaged bond with his son and there are sadly few parents who bother to parent their children like this. On the other, there is nothing wrong with getting professional help. There’s just something about Thomas and Linda that smacked of refusing to acknowledge what was truly going on with their son rather than just chalking it up to him being an odd duck.
- I’ve complained about this before, but I hate the “fun dad / mean mom” trope. Linda is so underdeveloped that we don’t really know very much about her, not even what she does for a living even though there are scenes where we see her at work. Then we get to spend the majority of the movie thinking she’s a horrendously irresponsible parent who lets her child run around New York City unsupervised, especially since he’s packed full of anxieties and phobias that make city life a near impossibility for him and a genuine danger given that he seems to freeze up in the middle of busy intersections. How no one hit this kid with a car I will never know. At the end of the film we get an implausible reveal that shows us Linda has been an Awesome Mom™ the whole time because while we thought Oskar had been running around New York knocking on the doors of strangers he thought would help him solve a mystery related to his dad, Linda had gotten to each of these people first and primed them for his visits. Um. What? “My emotionally traumatized child is trying to solve this weird mystery as part of a game he and his dad, who died on 9/11, set up and so when he comes to ask questions can you be nice to him and let him into your house and into your life?” I think we’re supposed to dislike the woman who told Linda to go away, but I understand completely where she is coming from.
- I like that Oskar and his grandma, who lived in the building across the street, communicated with walkie-talkies.
- I liked silent Max von Sydow and I liked that they kept him silent. The emotionally manipulative thing to do would have been to have him start speaking again after Oskar has one of his more vulnerable moments and they didn’t do that.
- I liked Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright but the whole Macguffin of keys and people with the last name Black was kind of meh, which I blame on the book for having as a plot in the first place.
- I think where this film really got me was with the same stuff that killed me about Where the Wild Things Are. As much as Oskar was perhaps not terribly likeable at times, I think it was still possible to be very sympathetic to him. There are moments where he has tantrums but it wasn’t because he’s some spoiled kid not getting his way, it’s because he doesn’t have the emotional tools to express himself and is just one big raw nerve. That felt real.