Young Oskar Schell (an excellent Thomas Horn) is in mourning. His jeweler father Thomas (Tom Hanks) was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, and ever since then, the boy has been obsessed with his passing. Highly intelligent, oddly gifted, and socially detached, Oskar wants to make sense of the tragedy -- and when he finds a key labeled "Black" among his late parent's belongings, he decides to go on a quest to find the lock it fits.

Much to his angry mother's (Sandra Bullock) chagrin, our hero takes off across the city, turning the task into one of the many imaginary flights of fancy (known as "reconnaissance expeditions") he used to share with his dad. Along the way, he meets up with a serious, silent man known as The Renter (Max Von Sydow) who has just moved into the room across from his grandmother (Zoe Caldwell), as well as a couple (Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright) dealing with their own interpersonal pain.

Stories which substitute the loss of one for the tragedy of all are rife within fiction. From The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to Steven Spielberg's recent War Horse, the use on one person's hurting to translate across all emotional boundaries is a bet few filmmakers fail with. In this case, Stephen Daldry (The Hours, The Reader) renders the sickening events of a 2001 Fall day and turns them into an almost cloying dissertation on learning to cope. We get the impression early on that Oskar is 'special' and that said circumstance may be the reason for the inferred rift between mother and son and child and planet. In many ways, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is one boy's wake-up call. It's a window into a world kept away by a empathetic parent, a mental condition, and some complex clue games.

Yes, this is contrived material, but it's good contrived material. We aren't supposed to take this gifted savant's search as realistic. Instead, it's a device meant to mean something...more. That revelation may seem like the heart and soul of narrative, but it's also its weakest link. We care more about the journey than the outcome -- and even then, the trip is so pat and preplanned for maximum emotional exposure that the mechanics are visible. And yet Daldry, who deserves some of the blame and most of the credit here, maneuvers through the mire with style and sensibility. The force of his vision makes up for the misgivings in Eric Roth's often overwrought script.

Because of the inherent trauma that still settles within the corners of our collective remembrance, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close fulfills its sometimes specious promise. It's not catharsis so much as a way to share the experience all over again without all of the pontification, horror, and suffering. In Oskar, we have a filter to find our way through the dust cloud of a decade ago. While foggy in his own way, his discoveries become our way of reliving, and our potential sense of relief.