Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/5/09
As I child, I remember loving
Maurice Sendak's classic book Where the Wild Things Are, with its'
iconic drawings of strange, otherworldly critters I can still remember
today, when I haven't seen a copy in at least 25 years. But
as Spike Jonze's movie version approached, I searched my memories trying
to remember the plot, and came up empty. Not that there's a LOT of
plot (the picture-heavy tale contains only 10 sentences), but I suspect
what there was kinda went over my little head while I was ooing and ahhing
at those awesome critters. Seeing Jonze's brilliant, moving film
version, I reflected upon the fact that while it's a story about a kid,
it's likely to find its' most receptive audience among adults. When
you're young, the world is a confusing and incomprehensible place.
And while we never entirely figure it out, a grown-up audience is more
likely to see how an island of sad monsters and the angry kid who briefly
becomes their King are symbols of the life-long struggle to carve out a
world you can wrap your brain around. If you choose to take your
kids, don't say you weren't warned, but for audiences on its' wavelength,
this is one of the best films of the year.
Young Max (Max Records) lives
in a lonely world of his own imaging. He has no friends, and one
by one his family is slipping away: his father is gone (whether by
divorce or worse, we do not learn), his older sister Claire (Pepita Emmerichs)
has moved on to kids her own age, and his loving Mom (Catherine Keener)
is feeling the tug of a demanding job and a new Boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo).
Max does not take this well, acting out with more and more violent outbursts,
finally running away from home after being sent to bed without his supper.
Wearing a dirty wolf costume, he wanders to the banks of a large lake and
finds a boat there. He gets in and drifts to a far-away island occupied
by monsters. One of them, Carol (voice of James Gandolfini) is in
a rage, and when Max joins him in a destructive rampage, the other creatures,
led by Judith (Catherine O'Hara), want to eat him. Backed into a
corner, Max declares magic powers and that he is a King who can fix all
their problems and bring them happiness. The monsters haven't had
a good history with Kings (Carol fishes their crown out of a stack of bones),
but things are not going well in the land of the Wild Things, and they're
happy to trust Max to make everything OK. He meets all the creatures:
Judith's boyfriend Ira (Forrest Whitaker), goat-like Alexander (Paul Dano),
who no one listens to, Carol's birdlike friend Douglas (Chris Cooper),
and the quiet, brooding Bull (Michael Berry Jr.). The source of Carol's
heartbreak is the departure of KW (Lauren Ambrose), who's gone off to spend
time with new, cooler friends. But she stops by and likes Max, agreeing
to stay while he leads the monsters in building a giant fort based on a
model Carol created. But while the project goes well, no amount of
activity can disguise the fact that each monster wants the others to be
something they're not. As the tension among them builds, it's only
a matter of time before the little boy who would be their King draws the
wrath of the Wild Things.
Although the movie plays
coy on the subject, it's almost certain that the central events of Where
the Wild Things Are take place entirely within Max's overactive imagination
during a short period of time rather than the days and weeks they seem
to cover, and Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers have done a brilliant job
creating a world that seems to exist only inside a little boy's head.
Wild Things is a swirling mass of play, terror, anxiety, love, rejection,
anger and monsters captures the true texture of childhood so well it will
likely terrify adults who prefer not to recall it so specifically even
more than kids, who're more likely to be bored by the melancholy story
than unsettled. The monsters are all aspects of Max's personality,
people he knows, or both, with Carol representing his frighteningly unchecked
rage and KW the sister who's abandoned him in favor of teenage interests.
In one of the creepiest and most psychologically complex sequences of the
year, Max gets to meet those “cool” friends KW's made away from the village,
and who they are and how she relates to them is as incomprehensible to
us as the world Claire now occupies is to him. And just as Mom has
good reason to fear the growing temper of the child she loves, so does
Max have good reason to worry about how Carol will react when his vision
of a perfect King is finally shattered. A child's unformed understanding
of death hovers relentlessly over the proceedings, as Max is haunted by
a teacher's matter-of-fact announcement to a science class that some day,
the sun will explode. And Carol takes Max for a walk through a desert
that once was mountains, then rocks, and now sand. And what comes
after sand?
One reason Where the Wild
Things Are went unfilmed for so many years is that there were a million
ways for it to go wrong, and just the right combination of filmmaker and
technology were going to be necessary to make it anything but a How
the Grinch Stole Christmas-like desecration of beloved source material.
Jonze fought against a sentiment to make the movie animated, and the CGI-enhanced
actors in suits he used to portray the Wild Things are truly remarkable.
When they first appear, my brain struggled to accept just how real they
looked, and there's a sense here that actual creatures with actual weight
pose an actual threat to a fragile little boy they could as easily crush
as love. Throughout, the use of real locations, people in suits and
a real kid gives the story a reality it needs in order to work. Records
is brilliantly cast, not just delivering a rock-solid performance of real
emotional depth, but also critically never seeming “cute”. Keener's
natural glow makes her the perfect choice for a character known only as
Mom. The voices of the Wild Things are all solid, but Gandolfini
in particular is tremendous, creating a vicious, destructive monster of
pure bleeding-hearted vulnerability. I don't envy any parent whose
kid asks “Why are the monsters sad?” because the answer plums the very
depths of the human soul, regardless of age.
This is big, challenging,
dark stuff, but there is also magic aplenty to Jonze's amazing realization
of a young boy's fantasy world. The monsters are as adorable as they
are dangerous, and there are lengthy sequences of reckless play (the book
does promise a “Wild Rumpus”, after all) that evoke a certain pure joy.
The beasts seem pretty much indestructible, and they bounce and crash and
smash their way through their world with a delightful abandon. One
of the best parts of Records' performance is the way he nails how kids
can lose their worries in play and then have them bubble back up once the
games are over.
Where the Wild Things
Are is not for everybody, and it's a rare joy to see such a challenging,
emotionally complex movie come from a major studio. Jonze has taken
those iconic images Sendak tied to his tale of lonely boys and rumpusing
monsters and built them into a world we can believe in, in large part because
it is defined by the emotions that define us. It is a film for adults
to love in our way just as children embrace its' 10-sentence source.
Children destined to become artists themselves will likely groove to the
brilliance with which it connects to their inner world. As for the
rest, well, don't say you weren't warned twice. |
