Extremely Loud and Incredibly Clear (2011)

This is it. This is the movie of the nine nominated for Academy Awards this past year that I think was the best. 'The Help' and 'The Descendants' were right up there as well, but this is the one that I would choose. Which puts me at great odds with the critics, but then again, all the reviews that I read did not see the film through the same lens that I saw it through. Trauma has a ripple effect. It doesn't just ripple through a community, it ripples across generations. Thomas Schell, who is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center had an absent father. His father was witness to extreme trauma in WWII and he never recovered. That made Thomas Schell who he was--he bent over backwards to be a warm and involved father, where his own was distant and broken. Tom's son, Oskar Schell has an autism spectrum illness. He has the extremely bright on technical details, very poor on social skills form, with some of the supersensitivity symptoms--like hyperacusis. He is unable to clearly see that saying exactly what you think can be cruel. His inability to bond with his mother takes on a harshness that is painful to watch. So Oskar needed a father like Tom, and when he was murdered by terrorists, Oskar's rigid perfectionistic mind searched desperately for meaning in that. The movie shows how him methodically pursuing his self-appointed task of matching up a key with a lock, and all the people it forces him to interact with along the way. In the process, he starts to heal, and yes, it is in some ways far to neat and tidy a bundle, but in others it is instructive of how to deal with grief. There isn't just one way, and allowing people their personal path is far better than burying the trauma, or imposing boundaries that don't fit onto someone. So, it turns out that while I can enjoy a sweeping artistic tour-de-fore, like 'The Artist', I would rather have something that makes me think, and this movie made me think, made me try to project this horrible situation and how to cope with it onto my radar.