In ‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,’ a boy on a mission

It’s fair to absorb five minutes of this movie and want to wring yourself out, to object to the feeling that the director Stephen Daldry has recruited you for more than two hours of baby-sitting, that, after “Billy Elliot,’’ “The Hours,’’ and “The Reader,’’ Daldry has managed, once again, to keep a serious subject high-minded by dunking it in kaleidoscopic art. This time, you fear, it’s a juice-box tragedy. The whimsy threatens early to turn lethal. In the opening minutes, the film’s title breaks into paper - the paper - the office sheets that, for days, rained all over New York like woeful, corporate confetti. September 11 here is called “the Worst Day.’’ And then there is Oskar, who is whimsy to the infinite power. He wears his taekwondo robes to his father’s funeral; insults his widowed mother (Sandra Bullock); refuses, out of fear of another attack, to conduct his search via the subway (only power-walks for him); and has fond memories of his father’s fantastical assertion of a sixth borough.

The movie’s been adapted by Eric Roth from Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, which was exasperating in a way that’s distinct from Daldry’s ideas about directing. Foer’s preciousness can be savant-like - minutiae and grand digressions for the sake of impressing you with their author’s craftiness. Foer strained to create profundity from a child’s cleverness and an elderly couple’s pain. So the book suffered from both selective naivete and self-regard - it’s a kid, but, really, it’s me; they’re old, but that’s me too! The movie forgoes Foer’s ambitious tweeness and presents Oskar’s outbursts and moodiness - that precociousness - as a disorder.