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.