The central character in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, now adapted to the screen by Stephen Daldry (The Reader, The Hours), is named Oskar. It is hard to shake the name’s reference to another child of literature, The Tin Drum’s Oskar Matzerath. Like The Tin Drum, which German writer Günter Grass penned in the heady days following World War II, when he left his bombed-out native land to hitchhike around France, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a work fueled by trauma. Set in the aftermath of 9-11, it is a novel that wrestles with the mind-numbing irrationality of that day by looking squarely at the contradictions between meaning and happenstance, strangers and human connectivity that the tragedy brought into full focus.

But Grass’ and Foer’s approaches to historical trauma are different, and those differences may explain why the German writer’s novel was able to be brought to the screen so successfully by Volker Schlöndroff, while Daldry’s adaptation of Foer’s book is something of a failure. For one, Grass creates a character that is a pure lyric force, anarchic and magical, practical and knavish. He is an embodiment of literary power – of art – in the face human ugliness, his wide-eyed, childlike perspective tainted with a thirst for setting adults, and all their hypocrisies, ablaze. He is a character that sees sentimentality itself as a numbing agent, one that readies people to be manipulated and used, their freedom co-opted.

Foer’s Oskar, on the other hand, is born of a world where love is both sincere and possible. And while the events of 9-11 confuse him (Oskar’s father dies in the attack on the World Trade Center), what the New Yorker Oskar is dealing with is the loss of love, how an essentially meaningless act can rob from us the little order we have to hold on to. In Foer’s book, Oskar’s journey is set in a flurry of wild, impatient language, a blooming mind both raging and obsessed. Oskar finds a key that was hidden at the bottom of a vase in his father’s closet, and he becomes convinced that the key will lead him to some deeper, post-mortem connection to his father.

But something is lost in Daldry’s translation of Foer’s linguistic achievement to the screen. While the director allows some of the energy of Oskar’s insistent monologue to remain, the movie version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close brings much of the story’s submerged sentimentality to the screen’s surface. It becomes an emphatic, almost trite tale about a boy whose curiosity drives him on a futile quest that ends up teaching him clean, heartwarming lessons about human feeling, kindness, and interrelation.

“For every key their must be a lock,” Oskar says to himself as he begins an elaborate and hyper-organized scavenger hunt to track down the key’s owner, someone who must be named “Black,” since that word was written on the envelope that held the key. “And for every name, there must be a person,” he continues. The people Oskar finds offer vignettes of everyday heartache: divorce, loneliness, anger, sexual identity, etc. In the movie, each scene is neatly framed and a little too representative.

Writing in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis accused the movie version of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close of treating 9-11, “not as an occasion for personal sacrifice, for national mourning or reflection, but as kitsch.” It is hard to come up with a more succinct way of describing what is wrong with the film. The movie is at times rich in tone, and at others full of feeling, but Daldry’s movie tries to treat trauma by finding an escape from it, by reducing realization to sentiment. Many of Foer’s amusing free associative wonderings play like truisms, lines like “People aren’t like numbers, they are like letters. And letters want to become stories. And stories want to be shared.” There is something too slick about all of it, too cute to feel really touched by suffering. It is amusing to wonder what Grass’ storybook character, Oskar, would do in this world, what he could discover about sacrifice and mourning by pealing back Daldry’s saccharine veneer. That Oskar, after all, was a reminder that it is not enough for art to terminate in feeling. It has a responsibility to dig a little deeper into the mystery.