Where the Wild Things Are

Studio: Warner Bros.
Directed by Spike Jonze; Starring: Max Records and Catherine Keener

Oct 22, 2009 By Chris Tinkham Web Exclusive

In Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are, a young boy named Max is sent to his room without supper after making mischief around his house and threatening to eat his mother. As a means of coping with his punishment, Max imagines a fantasy world in his bedroom, where he becomes the king of an island of wild, sharp-toothed beasts. Max could be any boy or girl prone to bouts of acting up—meaning, any normal boy or girl—and by the book’s end, it appears that all is forgiven and order is restored. Given the book’s brevity (it consists of 10 sentences) and children’s appetite for repetition, the notion that Max might cause mischief again, and that future banishments could lead to further fantastic adventures, hardly seems discouraging. Yet, something about this tale inspired director Spike Jonze and his co-screenwriter Dave Eggers to infuse the long-awaited feature film adaptation with a dispiriting sense of fear and sadness.

It’s a bold interpretation that never feels justified. The film’s conflicts are abandoned rather than resolved, which is disappointing considering that its beginning was embellished to explain what doesn’t need explaining: Kids can be restless and emotionally unpredictable. The film version of Max, played handily by Max Records, has a sister (Pepita Emmerichs) who doesn’t stick up for him and a single mom (Catherine Keener) who brings her work home. As templates for childhood loneliness in fiction go, this one is instantly familiar. Yet, despite all this exposition, it’s unclear why Max has no cohorts his own age. Craving attention and perturbed that his mom’s boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) has been invited to dinner, Max throws a tantrum that leads to him biting his mom on the shoulder. Unlike Sendak’s hero, this Max becomes frightened of what he’s done and hurt by his mom calling him wild. Instead of being sent to his room, he runs away and sails off to the island of the wild things.

Only, the wild things are hardly that; they’re a despondent and fractured group waiting on a king to right their way. Sendak’s wild things roared and showed their teeth but they didn’t speak, nor did they have names. The six wild things in the film, created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, are individual characters voiced by notable actors such as James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker. Though physically imposing at nine feet tall and resembling Sendak’s illustrations, they have personalities that are more comparable to the Eeyores and Snuffleupaguses of children’s entertainment rather than the Tazmanian Devils. They talk like anxiety-ridden, codependent adults who have been beaten down by life. Max assumes their throne with some fibbing, promising to keep sadness away, but it’s a daunting task for a 9-year-old. The book’s famous wild rumpus is a success, but where Sendak’s Max quit while he was ahead, this Max, already having disrupted a fragile habitat, begins to run out of ideas.

There’s no established correspondence, as in The Wizard of Oz, between the creatures and the people in Max’s real life. Maybe the wild things are fragments of Max’s psyche. Alexander, the goat voiced by Paul Dano, possesses the most character of the bunch, but Max latches onto the mercurial Carol (Gandolfini) and the elusive KW (Lauren Ambrose). A rift between Carol and KW has sent her to find friends outside the group of six.

There are sequences of playfulness and wild abandon that will please youngsters, but they are fleeting, which seems to be the point; director of photography Lance Acord repeatedly catches flares of sunlight upon descent. It’s interesting that Acord’s itinerant handheld style—a visual link between the work of Jonze and ex-wife Sofia Coppola—was retained for the directors’ most recent films (Where the Wild Things Are and Marie Antoinette), which belong to genres that typically abide by traditional photographic techniques. Jonze’s previous films have been sparked by a regressive, mischievous energy, but Karen O’s soundtrack contributions, which feature kids shouting in the background and sound like Arcade Fire imitations, is all regression and no mischief. Jonze has said that his intention was to make Where the Wild Things Are a movie about childhood rather than a children’s movie. The problem with that, though, is that the source material is a children’s book. Perhaps he’s re-envisioned it for the age of Ritalin, Prozac and divorce, but in making a psychologically ambivalent fantasy-art film, he’s alienating Where the Wild Things Are‘s built-in audience. George Lucas made a similar blunder by doing the opposite, appealing to children with The Phantom Menace when longtime Star Wars fans were hoping for something darker and more sophisticated.

One of this year’s more anticipated films, Where the Wild Things Are began filming in 2006 and cost $80 million to produce. It made a healthy $32 million at the box office during its opening weekend, but on its fifth day of release, its daily receipts dropped below that of a certain film screening at 3,000 fewer locations. That film, Paranormal Activity, was shot in seven days for $15,000. Some of the $80 million was put to good use; the computer-generated expressions on the faces of the wild things will sustain the attention of viewers of all ages, but anyone hoping to see a forest grow from Max’s room will be sorely disappointed.

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