Lost and Found

Each of the films (both Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Reign Over Me), have main characters that are and have been affected by the horrible tragic incident of September 11. However, it’s how our main characters cope (deal) with their tragedies that makes these films different and yet slightly the same.

So, to start off with both films have characters that have lost people in the incident of 9/11. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close our main character (Oscar) has lost his dad in 9/11. Instead of coping with the incident, it seems like he locked his grief in a brick box and threw it out in the middle of the ocean for it to sink to the bottom of the ocean floor and ran away to never look back. However, he is constantly secretly staring it in the face as he tries to find out and solve the mysteries that his dad left behind. Whereas in Reign Over Me, it is our second to main character (Charlie) that has lost his whole family in 9/11. In my opinion, he copes with his loss basically in the opposite way that Oscar does. He copes with it by basically allowing it to consume him and hasn’t really tried to cope with it. So, to sum it up, Oscar avoids it but is still aware of coping with it whereas Charlie is aware of it but avoids coping with it.

Overall, both of these films have devastating stories, but to choose one that is more devastating than the other, that’s a difficult one and in fact, I would have to say that they’re both equally devastating in my book. I say this because even though both of our discussed characters have tragically lost someone close to them, they both gained something along the way. So as something is lost a journey of grievance and healing is formed and along the way something is gained.