An imaginative inquisitive highly organized youth sets out into the unknown to find someone who can help him solve a mystery left behind after his father dies in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. A small envelope is discovered in his father's room after the fact containing both a key and the word "black" written upon it. Having no knowledge in regards to what/whom the word "black" refers nor the lock to which the key corresponds, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) looks up everyone with the last name Black in New York City and systematically sets out to question them. During his information search, he befriends an elderly man renting a room in his grandmother's apartment who can't speak and communicates through writing (Max von Sydow as The Renter). The two become friends as they travel throughout New York meeting new people, emboldened by purpose.
Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close humanizes research while providing a matrix through which one can rationally seek solutions to seemingly interminable problems.
As long as you stick to the plan.
By populating his thesis with living breathing representatives of New York's undeniable particularity, Oskar indirectly creates a community while simultaneously emphasizing the tragedy of 9/11, thereby universalizing his personal loss.
The research process itself is romanticized as it becomes apparent that sometimes elucidating sought after truths is secondary to the divergent revelations of the quest wherein they are potentially sequestered, as new avenues of inquiry are brought to life.
If the actual question indeed finds an answer the secondary/tertiary/. . . tributaries can still be categorically synthesized through the production of a multidimensional social democratic topography, modestly celebrating the new (the collection of letters Oskar sends out in the end).
The degree of ease with which such a topography is manifested directly corresponds to the intensity of the author's desire to illuminate his or her original inquiry.
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