The personal, idiosyncratic, and melancholy nature of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are may put off those expecting to see their idea of Maurice Sendak’s classic. But it’s exactly those same daring traits that make the film better with time. Maybe it is or is not for kids–or maybe it’s just a beautiful, moving film for viewers of any age.
(The following is a reprint of the redblog review of Where the Wild Things Are on its theatrical release last fall. The movie is now available in DVD and for rental in the redboxes.)
Director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers’ adaptation of Where the
Wild Things Are is a treasure of thoughtful, moving, and lovely
filmmaking. It is exactly the kind of movie so many of us seek out so
desperately at the cineplex: personal, emotionally resonant, and
aesthetically daring and dazzling.
No, this is not Maurice Sendak’s beloved children’s book brought to the screen with surface
faithfulness. Instead it’s Jonze’s touching, introspective, personal
interpretation of the book. He and Eggers (the talented and sometimes
annoyingly earnest author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius) have remained absolutely faithful to and honest
about what Where the Wild Things Are means to them.
What
we have on screen is a powerful meditation on childhood and especially a
childhood haunted by loss—in this case an implied divorce and absent
father. All the chaotic joy and wild imaginative abandon of Sendak’s
book is here, but so is melancholy and the same sort of existential
sadness that Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman explored in Being
John Malkovich and Adaptation.
(In the past, I’ve
held similar takes on both Jonze and Eggers: I admire their
vision and graceful talents, appreciate how they can conjure moments of
aching beauty out of
profound existential sadness, and yet also feel both sometimes get lost
gazing into their own navels.)
Right away, the “wildness” of Max (young newcomer Max Records) is not
the playful shenanigans of Sendak’s rambunctious kid, but something
more complex, anchored in loneliness and loss, driven by anger into
desperately loud pleas for attention. Pensive and sensitive one minute,
tyrannical and destructive the next, Max is not sent to his room for
being too wild—he runs away after verbally and physically assaulting his
mother (the always perfect Jonze collaborator Catherine Keener).
When Max arrives via
tempest-tossed sea at the island of the Wild Things, he finds beasties
that are frightening, to be sure, but they are also worried,
angst-ridden, and echo Max’s need to lash out and destroy in order to
vent those feelings and get attention. These creatures are big, hulking,
and physically intimidating like adults; but like kids they are full of
emotions they cannot understand or control.
Among the fine Wild Thing voice cast, Chris Cooper, Paul Dano, and
Forest Whitaker all do excellent work, but the standouts include
Catherine O’Hara as Judith, who cracks wise with some of the film’s
funniest lines, but also often transmutes her bitter pessimism into
menace. Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) is K.W., the maternal
figure and source of soft caring and love.
James Gandolfini voices
Carol, the erstwhile leader of the creatures and the one most wracked by
petulant jealousy and mood swings born of self-doubt and self-pity.
(While Carol and Judith exchange some note-perfect bickering, Carol’s
nervous discussion with Max about the fate of the sun is one of my
favorite moments in the film.) There’s no doubt Gandolfini’s Carol
shares some unsettling traits with his Tony Soprano—both want to be
loved and happy and yet also feared and respected, and both can turn on a
moment’s notice from friendly to fearsome, betrayed into anger by their
own insecurities. These are monsters with some very heavy interpersonal
issues.
It’s also easy to take Max
Records’ performance for granted—the young
boy is so natural, so authentic that you forget you’re watching an
actor. You might compare his achievement to that of Henry Thomas 27
years ago in E.T., but what Jonze has coaxed out of Records feels
so
much more pure, stripped of any Hollywood “showiness” or the preening
self-awareness you see in many child actors.
By playing with such grown-up themes, Spike Jonze’s take is not going
to please everyone. Yes, this is an art film (or “artsy fartsy” as we’d
say back in Iowa) that speaks to adults’ feelings about childhood and
growing up, about the life learned and left behind on the playgrounds of
memory.
Most appealing is Jonze’s
choice to go naturalistic. Shot in a sun-dappled Australia full of trees,
leaves, rocks, dirt, and sand, this is a rough and rugged-looking film,
jangling along to the guitar of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O. As you’ve
no doubt heard, the Wild Things are not intangible CGI creations, but
real, large, heavy, shaggy puppets (with CGI faces and expressions added
later). When they dance and run and jump and pile on Max they’re really
there. That’s one of the more important creative decisions Jonze
made—it makes the creatures feel true and present, and their
relationship to small, human Max is given more heft. We feel it more
deeply when they comfort him—and when they occasionally threaten to eat
him. (Their threats are born more out of pique, frustration, and fear
than malevolence. Still, there are human bones on the island…)
On the other hand, while Jonze’s characterizations of the Wild Things
make Where the Wild Things Are an emotionally and dramatically
effective film, in the second half—when those jealousies and bickerings
come to dominate the narrative—it’s possible some younger kids will
simply get bored. Children have always understood more than adults give
them credit for, and I think a lot of this Where the Wild Things Are
will resonate with young viewers on levels they might not even be aware
of. But it will be interesting to see how young kids hang in there
during the scenes that lean more toward group therapy.
At one point
Judith says “Happiness isn’t always the best way to be happy,” and Where
the Wild Things Are takes that to heart. Jonze and Eggers believe
that to be truly happy one must embrace the reality of living and learn
to alchemize sadness, loss, and loneliness into something vital and
alive and thus somehow joyful on a larger scale. And that’s the journey
they give their Max, who learns that despite his King of the Wild Things
title, he cannot fix everything and everyone, cannot keep them all
together.
If that feels like a lot to ask of a “kids’” book and too much
to put into a “kids’” film, then so be it; maybe this isn’t a kids’
film, but simply a good film, to be
applauded and embraced as a personal statement and
honest—sometimes heart-breaking—exploration.
It’s a miracle and a marvel that Jonze’s film even exists, let alone that it’s so cinematically beautiful and emotionally
effective. It makes Where the Wild Things Are something
lasting and true—a film that, like the book it honors, many of
us will be cherishing for a very long time.
