“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is extremely cruel and incredibly painful to many of us who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.
Not four months ago on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I stood at the Pentagon watching a wreath being placed on my son’s memorial bench and those of the other 183 people who died with him. He was 32 years old and the father of two little girls with a son on the way. I listened to the military band and the speeches and stared at the now pristine building where my son died.
For ten years, the families who lost loved ones on that horrific day, along with those who survived, have been reminded of it incessantly through news stories, TV shows, advertisements for coins and medals, fiction written in the past ten years, references in movies, and through every other conceivable means. The images of the billowing smoke and flames from the buildings where our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, other family members, and friends died still appear without warning everywhere we go.
The makers and stars of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” have once again stirred up the anguish. Even though I will never see the movie, the commercials for it are everywhere. This movie will run its course and disappear from the spotlight, but right now it is one more reminder of the day I try so hard to put out of my mind so I can remember my son without the images of his death.
I’m sure there are those who will see this movie and not think that it’s too soon or that the memories it portrays are too painful. Still, for me it’s too soon and it will always be too soon. I don’t know why Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock chose to make the movie, but I am disappointed in them for what seems like a further exploitation of a terrible tragedy and the still raw feelings of its victims.