You will have glimpsed the heart of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” one of the last, and most challenging, films to enter an unusually chaotic field of Oscar contenders.
Directed by Stephen Daldry and produced by Scott Rudin, “Extremely Loud” is set for release by Warner Brothers in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas. Nearly a month later the picture will reach theaters around the country.
Along the way it will provide an occasionally shocking coda to the year of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The movie may also bring something new — the raw hurt of a still very open wound — to an Academy Awards race that has delivered novelty (in a nearly silent picture, “The Artist”), a look back at the racial divide (in “The Help”) and trouble in a tropical paradise (in “The Descendants”).
“Are we ready for it? Are we not ready for it?” Mr. Daldry asked rhetorically on Friday after two weeks of screening the film, only recently completed, for audiences on both coasts. “People will have to make up their own minds.”
Voters from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association were not ready. After watching the picture on Dec. 4, three days before a screening deadline for their Golden Globes nominations, they shut the film out. That dealt a snub to Mr. Daldry, who drew Oscar nominations for directing his last three features, “The Hours,” “Billy Elliot” and “The Reader.”
One of approximately 90 Globes voters, who spoke on condition of anonymity in deference to the association’s general practice of confidentiality, said the association had been deeply split on “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” Some members, this voter said, were very strongly drawn to it, while others were left cold by a story line they saw as a bit too fantastic.
Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” tells of a boy, Oskar Schell, played by Thomas Horn. His father, played by Tom Hanks, has died in the trade center collapse, leaving behind six telephone messages and, inadvertently, an unlikely quest that pushes Oskar — who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome — far out of his comfort zone.
Published in 2005, the book was admired by some critics but excoriated by others who found it exploitive or overly sentimental. “I got ‘This book is wonderful,’ and ‘This book is horrible,’ ” Mr. Foer recalled in a phone interview on Friday.
Oddly enough, such a polarity might now prove an advantage in the Oscar contest, because changes this year in balloting for best picture have put a premium on first-place votes. As few of 250 of those — assuming that about 5,000 of 5,800 voting members in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences actually cast ballots — can create a nominee by conferring the requisite 5 percent of the first-place votes that are called for under the Academy’s rules.
At the same time a further change in tallying procedures has diminished the potential impact of lower-ranked votes, explained Steve Pond, a writer for TheWrap.com, who has made a close study of the process.
“In previous years you were getting votes from many different places on the ballot,” Mr. Pond said. Under a complicated counting method, he said, second-, third- fourth- and even lower-place votes for a movie could push it onto the best picture roster.
But now the first-place votes are all but decisive, which may provide a path forward, albeit a narrow one, for Warner as it steers “Extremely Loud” through the Oscar race. Mr. Rudin acknowledged, after the Golden Globes snub, that “those who love it, love it passionately, and those who resist it find it too tough as an emotional experience.” The response from critics and audiences is likely to cover the range of those extremes.
But if the movie gains traction among filmgoers as a “talker” dealing with a substantive and contemporary subject — as “The Hurt Locker” did two years ago, and no current contender has yet done — it might conceivably follow that picture to the top.
“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” faced a critical moment as an awards contender on Sunday, when it was screened for Oscar voters at the Academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters. The response, by Mr. Pond’s report, was muted, , but Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter, at the same time weighed in with a strong review predicting audiences “will be emotionally wrenched by the treatment of loss.”
“The only thing I can tell you is that I’ve done Q. and A.’s at six screenings, and I’ve never had a reaction like this,” said Eric Roth, who adapted Mr. Foer’s book for the screen. An Oscar winner for “Forrest Gump,” and three times a nominee since, Mr. Roth said he has been struck by the complexity of an audience response that has mixed raucous laughter with weepy breakdowns.
“They really enjoy, kind of, the grieving of it,” he said.
Unlike Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” and Paul Greengrass’s “United 93,” both released in 2006, Mr. Daldry’s film dwells on the emotional aftermath of Sept. 11, rather than its immediate drama. It aspires to find the universality in grief, and, for some, at least, it succeeds.
“I think it’s a beautiful, beautiful film, I really do,” said Kathy Murphy, who saw it three times while advising Mr. Daldry on post-Sept. 11 realities.
A director of the nonprofit Tuesday’s Children, a support group for the families of the attacks’ victims, Ms. Murphy said Mr. Daldry was attentive to advice about details, like a tendency among the living to leave change on a dresser or clothes in the closet as mementos of a loved one.
A particularly tough encounter between Ms. Bullock’s Linda Schell and Mr. Horn’s Oskar, a centerpiece of both the film and the novel, she said, only mimics what she has seen between a surviving parent and angry offspring. “Is it normal teen behavior? Is it because of 9/11?” she said she has been asked by those whose children sometimes feel that the mother or father who died that day might have been the better parent.
Grief, of course, can be catnip for Academy voters. “Ordinary People,” “Terms of Endearment,” and, this year, another strong contender, “The Descendants,” come to mind. (And disability, handled properly, can be a plus, as with “Rain Man” and Mr. Roth’s own “Forrest Gump.”)
Further, the movie world has been inclined to linger on real-life trauma after the first shock has worn off. The Vietnam War-theme dramas “Coming Home,” a best picture nominee, and “The Deer Hunter,” the winner, were thus honored in 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon. In the next decade or so “Apocalypse Now,” “Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” and “Born on the Fourth of July” all received nominations and awards from the Academy.
As for the Sept. 11 families, Ms. Murphy said most will not see Mr. Daldry’s film until it opens, or at a private screening in January.
And some, she added, will simply never look at almost anything connected to the attacks.
“There are plenty in the 9/11 community that are not going to go near this,” Ms. Murphy said. “They won’t go to the memorial. They want no reminders.”
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