Where the Wild Things Are (2009): B+

Loneliness, anger and fear are primal emotions that, in the hearts of children, can swell and consume with great tumult, a fact that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are taps into with tenderness and respect. In adapting Maurice Sendak’s beloved 1963 children’s book for the screen, Jonze adds much – an unavoidable result of his source material containing only nine sentences and 400 words – and yet, in the final tally, not all that much save for deeper expressions of those turbulent anxieties that always defined Sendak’s classic. As in print, the Being John Malkovich director’s tale focuses on riotous Max (Max Records), a young boy who’s introduced pursuing the family dog around the house while wearing a dirty wolf costume, brandishing a knife and howling like an animal. He’s a beast, and yet one whose unchecked fury stems not from innate beastliness but, in this version, from the sadness that comes from neglect. One senses this immediately from the subsequent scene in which, while building a snow igloo on the front yard, Max is first ignored by his cell phone-obsessed older sister (Pepita Emmerichs) and then – after he entices her friends to a snowball fight that ends with his igloo smashed (the ceiling, and world, caving in) and him in tears – callously ditched by her.

Mom (Catherine Keener) is more attentive, but Max is unable to alleviate her taxing work concerns with funny dances and, when she opts to spend the night not playing in his fort but giggling and drinking with a new beau (Mark Ruffalo), the boy snaps. A bite to mom’s shoulder during a tantrum sends him scurrying into the woods and, via Jonze’s sinuous jump-fades, into a dreamworld where a boat – not unlike the homemade toy one found in his room – is waiting to be piloted to a distant shore where, around a raging bonfire, enormous furry creatures (surprisingly expressive CG-enhanced puppets) reside. Jonze segues smoothly from heightened handheld-shot domestic realism to entrancing fantasticality, his camera steadying slightly and attuning itself more fully to the sparkle of the sun and the tactility of the autumnal forest and barren desert in which Max finds himself. This magical island netherworld, boasting the potential for both jolly warmth and alienating cold, is the byproduct of Max’s vivid, tormented imagination, and as such, the Wild Things that inhabit it are the story’s de facto heart, vessels through which Max can explore, wrestle with, and understand his own (and his mother’s) sorrowful emotions.

Of the Wild Things, it is Carol (voiced, with sensitivity and ferocious frustration, by James Gandolfini) who most closely speaks to Max, as the monster’s misery over the departure of his beloved KW (Lauren Ambrose) mirrors that of Max’s own social isolation and absentee father’s abandonment. Depending on the moment, Carol is at once a proxy for Max’s interior state and the child to “King” Max’s parent, a duality that Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers shrewdly refuse to reconcile. Through this central relationship the film delicately comes to inhabit a very specific, childlike mindset, one in which loss and solitude and tempestuous acting-out are all of a lucid, logical piece. And though the director refuses to let a tender moment breathe without first smothering it with borderline-twee indie rock (often accompanied by Karen O’s humming), his cinematography beautifully alternates between exhibiting womb-like warmth and frightening, kinetic volatility. Despite its bouncy physicality and young protagonist, the melancholic Wild Things is not a movie for kids. It is, however, a mature, striking exploration of the way that kids feel – their need for comfort and safety, and their instinct to revolt when deserted – and how understanding those emotional dynamics can be (as expressed by a near-heartbreaking silent final glance between reunited mother and son) the first step toward an adult awareness of one’s parents and self.

Comments

[Emily Wilkes]

I'm really looking forward to seeing this film. Where the Wild Things Are was one of my favorite books as a child, and I look forward to seeing how the imagination and creativity of the story are captured on film.

[edwin sanchez]

I see Where the Wild Things Are as more of an art film than a children's film.