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| Sandra Bullock |
“Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” a movie in which she plays the wife of a 9/11 victim, just doesn’t seem like Sandra Bullock’s type of thing – even if Tom Hanks does play her husband.
Still, it brings her back to the screen after a year that was both the best and the worst of her life.
Bullock has the kind of bright, cheeky perkiness that makes you want to hug her and take care of her. The former East Carolina University student has always had a knack for making fun of the fame that seemingly afflicts her. Since her breakthrough in 1994’s “Speed,” she’s been through a reign as America’s sweetheart, even surviving a rash of repetitive, often bad, movies. We kept worrying that she would fatally succumb to what we call “the curse of Meg Ryan” – the struggle to thrive beyond the perky and cute years.
Bullock experienced great highs (winning the 2010 best-actress Oscar for “The Blind Side” and becoming Hollywood’s top-grossing female star) followed by dismal lows (embarrassing custody fights when her husband, Jesse James, was caught having an affair shortly after her Academy Awards triumph).
Suddenly, the girl next door became the woman whose marital troubles were aired in all the tabloids.
In quick succession, she divorced the motorcycle-building host of TV’s “Monster Garage” and went ahead with the adoption of baby Louis (born in New Orleans), whom the couple had planned to adopt before “the trouble.”
It seems strange that the vehicle Bullock picked for her return was a small role as a loving but somewhat uninvolved mother in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” which finally opens in local theaters today after many delays.
The movie reportedly went through some 50 script revisions or changes in an apparent effort to offset the suspicion that it was “about” the 9/11 tragedy. The ads claim it is more about the personal aftermath than the event itself.
Although Hanks and Bullock are billed as the stars, the movie is actually about a 9-year-old boy who sets out across New York City on his own looking for clues to a key left by his dead father. The boy worshiped his father but remains distant from his mother, even after the tragedy. Young Thomas Horn (11 at the time of filming and now 14) is the real star – discovered when he won $31,800 on “Jeopardy.”
Sitting at the Regency Hotel in New York City, Bullock dispels any doubts about her choice for a comeback role.
“I wasn’t thinking about any of the commercial things,” she said. “I was just so happy being a mom. This is entirely new to me. Suddenly, I was no longer a selfish actress worried about a career. I had this small thing that was dependent upon me to take care of it. That’s a great feeling, particularly when it’s new. That became my full priority. Whatever next opportunity there was, it had to be amazing for myself and for my son.”
It helped that Hanks was already aboard by the time she heard about the movie. And that the director was Stephen Daldry, who had earned Oscar nominations for all three of his previous efforts – “Billy Elliot,” “The Reader” and “The Hours.”
“He came to my house and told me about the movie, and I was sold,” Bullock said. “I had particularly wanted to work with Stephen since seeing ‘The Reader.’ ”
“Extremely Loud,” though, went through endless changes before its release. One segment, in which her character had a flirtation, perhaps an affair, with a character played by James Gandolfini, was cut altogether.
The film’s subtext struck an emotional chord with Bullock, who was staying at a SoHo hotel in lower Manhattan when the passenger jets struck the twin towers.
“I was in full view of both towers,” she says.
“I saw the second plane, and I saw people helping people. That is the thing that resonates about the city of New York to me. Within seconds, the entire city came together, and residents helped each other in a way they hadn’t the day before.”
“I think,” she added “that the story is about honoring people’s grief, while giving them permission to have grief. I loved that it showed generations in pain – the young boy and the mother – and how they healed each other by listening and talking.”
More than that, she loves New York City itself.
“The movie is shown from a child’s point of view, and I remember that. I remember being a child in New York. My father was a voice teacher here in New York, and my mother sang opera here. Since we lived in Arlington, Va., we were always on the trains coming to New York from D.C. For when my parents had jobs in New York, we had a tiny little studio apartment with a kitchen in the closet. We slept on floors and pullout beds.”
Her father, John Bullock, was an Army employee and part-time voice coach from Birmingham, Ala. Her mother, Helda, was a German opera singer and voice teacher, whom he met when he was stationed in Nuremberg, where Sandra’s maternal grandfather was a rocket scientist. Sandra frequently accompanied her mother on her opera tours throughout Europe, studying ballet and voice. She had small parts in the children’s chorus of various operas.
