Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - NY Times Review

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I have already seen the film at an advanced screening with the Director and the Screenwriter. My thoughts are this is an excellent film and well worth watching - perhaps one of the best of the year.

However the following passage from this week's New York Times is SHOCKING!! !

GRATEFUL TO BE CHILD-FREE

This is how the reviewer understood the point of the film and the Asperger's character. I don't know about the rest of folks on this board but I was so angry/disgusted I wanted to encourage other people to read this review and add their thoughts. This reviewer completely lacks an understanding of Aspergers and the NY Times should be held to a higher standard. I can't believe that they would allow someone to review the film who clearly didn't understand the story and instead decided to create an interpretation on the story that no one envolved in the production could imagine.

I hate to suggest this but I think this reviewer needs to be made an example of for her utter lack of awareness - calling for Aspergers child to be banished or worse wished they were never born just made me so mad.

How do you all feel?

All the reviewer is saying is that some people would respond warmly to this child while others would not. Her point is not that the child ought not to have been born or anything like it, just that in real life he would not receive the almost universally positive responses shown in the film.

I haven't seen the film, but the point seems a good one. When my mum tells me about things I did as a child which my family thought were cute or clever, I think that I sounded awful! It would be odd to demand that every reviewer pretends that all Aspie children are universally adorable: they'll each be liked by some adults and not others, as will every NT child.

I've not seen the movie, so I can only comment on the review. Writer Manolah Dargis exhibits barely-contained hostility from start to finish. She also uses the word "kitsch" in the opening paragraph and in her summation. Obviously she thinks the movie has reduced 9/11 to something horribly sentimental.

I don't think any filmmakers quite know what to do with 9/11. Most attempts have been awkward. But who is the star of this film - 9/11 or the character "Oskar"? It appears to me that the story is really about a boy's odyssey in order to come to terms with his father's death.

The "grateful to be child-free" statement is really unfortunate. It says a lot about the writer. I would also hope that more people would take some time to actually understand what AS is, especially before they write or comment on it. On the surface, it's not that hard. On a few recent occasions, I've seen it referred to as a mental illness.

What really upsets the most from this reviewer, and some other accompanying reader reviews, is the sentiment that AS is a choice and represents precocious privileged children of the Upper West Side who should be shunned or worse.

Witness these sentiments in reader comments for the review:

In the film (this is an adaptation from a book) Oskar is challenged to explore the world in a series of complex quest carefully crafted by his father to enhance his personal interaction with the world around him.

The reviewer instead simply say that Oskar is cosseted.

From the first frame of the film, nothing could be further from the life that Oskar is living. Reading her review I felt like I was reading a review for a different film and one with preconceived malice for the filmmakers/author, and one where the actual film didn't get shown to the reviewer, or perhaps this is the movie she made up in her mind.

I have since seen the film two more times, and I have access to the official legal screener, so I do have an advantage but not one that I suspect the reviewer from the Time could not have as well.

Any review of the film should include a brief understanding of the significance of AS. It could be the fault of the film that there is no audience explainer but the NY Times reviewer, and indeed some of the reader reactions, just amplify my own horror at the stereotypical belief that AS child deserve punishment, abandonment, shunning or worse still - death.

The NY Times needs to at least acknowledge that their reviewer has utterly missed the point of AS and the point that the film is making about the challenges of growing up with AS and simultaneously facing a life changing tragedy that is played out in the form of personal grieving and national horror.

The post 9/11 period of private and public grieving make for an amazing opportunity to explore that special time in NYC when people briefly shed their hard,dense public shells and allowed us all to become a small community of 8 million people. Every once an while we see this sentiment return and this film is a wonderful reminder of that time of common hope and prayer.

Allowing Oskar the opportunity to explore his own meaning while meeting what appear to be random strangers is engaging and meaningful.

Seeing how his parents choose to highlight his AS enhanced skills is inspiring and the loss is all the more profound as we understand that absent his father's unique understanding of how to make an AS kid feel good about himself there is a gaping hole in his life - and the randomness of his death at 9/11 only accentuates the tragedy.

Oskar not only learns of the fate of his father as it is happening on TV but through a series of phone messages left on the family answering machine.

No child would be untouched by this level of tragedy and the fact that Oskar chooses to embrace his exploration skills and set out on a quest to find meaning is inspiring and hopeful.

The New York Times should be ashamed of this review and the atmosphere it created on their website. I feel that the community should demand more from this paper than to simply let this go unanswered. Perhaps a letter writing campaign to the Times is in Order.

or perhaps this is the movie she made up in her mind.

This is what reviews of art usually come down to.

NYCStefano, I really don't see the hostility to AS that you describe. The reviewer actually focuses upon the perceived emotional manipulation of the film, and as part of that, the unlikeliness of adults' response to Oskar. The reference to his being "cosseted" has nothing to do with his AS but just the fact that he is a middle-class child whose experiences are unlikely to have included (or prepared him for) roaming alone around all areas of the city. The review specifically talks about "the unreality of any 11-year-old walking alone from his cosseted life on the Upper West Side to various points in Brooklyn and elsewhere".

The review does give a strong opinion with which you are fully entitled to disagree - indeed, it is presumably intended to draw such responses as that's how newspaper websites try to get page views and comments. You clearly love the film, so it's not nice to read a negative review like this, but it's hard to see the basis for a letter-writing campaign.

Some of the reader comments are another matter...

It's a movie critique. Critics CRITICIZE. It's what they do. I bet the same reviewer has said things about other movies and characters that steamed plenty of people.

This doesn't have anything to do with serious commentary on AS IMHO. The writer is just doing his/her job. Simple as that and not worth getting worked up over.

Suggesting that AS children should be unwanted is simply not acceptable critism.

This is not about the film but the characteristic of an AS child.

Is this not clear enough?

Maybe, it is progress that a critic can express her opinion concerning a character believed to have Aspergers as if he were Neuro-typical.

TheSunAlsoRises

Saw the trailer.... hopefully its good.... I hope....

Reader response criticism has completely destroyed true film review.

Meh, if they aren't at least a little snarky with the films they review they lose their credibility as critics.

BTW - just watched a preview of this movie; looks a well built product. I think it should do well.

I read the book and the Oskar charter was never refereed to as an aspie. He had some aspie qualities but was probably not an aspie.
He had post-traumatic stress like anyone would who's father died in a horrible tragedy. To say he's an aspie without considering post traumatic stress first is foolish.

That was just a review and does not represent how autism is covered by the media. I doubt that hollywood can do the book justice.