Memory has a way of stripping down childhood to its essentials. We have blurry images of the happiest moments, as well as the times that were particularly sad or embarrassing, while the more mundane passages tending to fade away. In the first 20 minutes of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, Max (Max Records), the very young protagonist, tries to keep himself occupied by running around his house in a wolf costume chasing his cat. He wants to play with his older sister, but she is more interested in her friends. When he tries to get his mother’s attention, she is occupied with a date. It is difficult for Max to communicate in any meaningful way to the older people who surround him, and his life generally consists of tedium punctuated by occasional retreats to the world of fantasy.
“I didn’t set out to make a children’s movie,” says Spike Jonze in the press notes for Where the Wild Things Are. “I set out to make a movie about childhood.”
Jonze’s film is based on Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, first published in 1963. Unless I heard it during kindergarten, I read it for the first time standing in an Indigo bookstore on my way to see this film. Sendak’s book is striking in its brevity: 48 pages and, except for nine little sentences, all pictures, with spare prose that evokes the simple precision of a haiku. I wish I had been exposed to it when I was younger. “That very night in Max’s room a forest grew—and grew—and grew until his ceiling hung with vines.” This is beautiful imagery, but if my enthusiasm for the book is somewhat muted, I suppose it’s because I am no longer at an age where I regularly turn to fantasy for solace. (Well, not fantasies involving friendly monsters, anyway…)
The book has only as much of a story as is needed to provide a framework for its images and emotions. The film provides Max with an on-screen mother, played by Catherine Keener, and gives the big, furry “Wild Things” names and personalities, but it remains more interested in mood than plot. Comparing a feature-length movie with a children’s storybook is really pointless, but I’d like to say that I—a Where the Wild Things Are virgin—had an easier time connecting to the film than the book, as the movie is a story about childhood for adults, not children.
Hire Spike Jonze (director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) to make a kids’ movie, and you get… a Spike Jonze movie. I have no idea what kids are going to make of this thing. Just as the book drew much of its power from a child reader’s instinctive feelings of fear of parental punishment and comfort in imaginary friends, adult viewers of the film will appreciate the exquisite sense of childhood melancholy that Jonze evokes with his slow pace and earthy colour palette. I predict many kids will be bored by such a meditative experience, and I suspect that childhood melancholy is an emotion best understood by those who are no longer children.
The story is told through Max’s perspective, to the point where our hero has even defaced the Warner Brothers logo (“A Time Warner Max Production”), and we are not privy to any information about his family that does not immediately affect him (in the credits, characters are known as simply “mother” and “the boyfriend”). How refreshing to see a kid in a movie who’s actually a kid, with self-centeredness and irritability to match his sweetness, and whose emotional maturation is real, but modest enough to be believable.
The imaginary wild things are all reflections of Max: Alexander (Paul Dano) is small and often ignored; Carol (James Gandolfini) is big-hearted, impulsive, and naïve; Judith (Catherine O’Hara) is sharp but casually cruel; KW (Lauren Ambrose) is kind and loving but unsure of her position in the world. These are tremendously lovable characters, all the more so because of their flaws. Unlike most voice actors in Hollywood family movies, the famous cast members approached the wild things as actual characters and not excuses for star turns, and speak their lines with real nuance and feeling. As delivered by Ambrose, the famous line “I could eat you up, I love you so” achieves special poignancy.
Where the Wild Things Are takes its sweet time. Jonze sees no need to hurry to the next contrived plot point when he can just relax and spend time with his characters. Maybe the biggest (and most backhanded) compliment I can pay to this film is that I wanted even less plot and even more of those pure scenes where Max and the wild things are napping together in a great big pile, or causing the “wild rumpus,” or wandering aimlessly in their surrounding deserts. Where the Wild Things Are is pitch-perfect at many things, and none more so than its remembrance of the deep, soothing comfort of fantasy.
VVVVv
