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Movie review: 'Where the Wild Things Are'
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Where'd that Wild Thing go...?
Where the Wild Things Are/2009 - Directed by: Spike Jonze
Starring: Max Records, Catherine Keener, James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker and Chris Cooper.
The Plot: How do you turn a 48 page children's book into a 100 minute film? That's easy - just add sugar...
A young boy (Max) caught in that pre-pubescent midlife crisis somewhere between toy-box and Xbox feels that his world is changing far too fast to keep up with. His only course of action involves a wolf suit and an appetite for destruction. Expelled from normal society our junior hero Max discovers the one and only place a bored little kid can raise pure hell in - the land of the Wild Things...
The Good: So somebody finally made an art film for children. This Wild Things adaptation pulls off an almost impossible hat trick. It expounds on its admittedly scanty source material without depreciating the classic status of the novel. It pulls a most excellent acting performance out of a child actor who's name isn't Highmore or Fanning. And it does all this without pandering to modern children's entertainment conventions.
Where the Wild Things Are isn't a safe kid's flick. In fact most of the time we're left wondering if Max will survive his time spent among the teeth and claws of the Wild Things or the murderous terrain they call home. He does - no spoil intended - but the journey will be rough one on the school-aged set.
What makes it a trip worth taking are the constant surprises by the filmmaker, the script, and the inescapable enchantment of seeing these storybook monsters brought to wonderful life by the wizards at Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The Muppets of yesterday were almost gone forever - replaced by computer generated androids with more movement possibilities and much less soul. Spike Jonze knows that it's much easier to fall in love with a real, fifteen-foot-tall teddy bear than it is a computer program. Where the Wild Things Are will most definitely remind of you of all of those live action Fantasy films that you remember from your own childhood. Labyrinth. Never-ending Story. The Dark Crystal. That lost feeling lives on in this film.
This isn't a movie for today's kids - it's for the kids who grew up on Maurice Sendak's book twenty years ago. There's so much about the melancholy of growing up, the fragility and ultimately the dissipation of youth, in the context of this screenplay. So much of who Max is, where his pain comes from, why life is so confusing to him, is hidden in the Wild Things themselves. Each critter's a persona of Max - and each creature manages to still maintain its own identity.
James Gandolfini's Carol is an absolutely amazing performance - maybe even my favorite of the actor's career. Carol's got so much fierce intensity, so much hope for the Wild Things as a species, so much pain at even the thought of his world collapsing - there really isn't another comparison in any other kid's movie before this one. Really - I'm digging through the scrap-pile I call a memory and I'm coming up empty handed...
The Bad: So somebody finally went and made an art film for kids... Yeah. The kids ain't really gonna' like it. Where the Wild Things Are is the cinematic equivalent of Brussels sprouts. There's no real story, no perceivable goal, no plot-devices, no golden cup, no captured Princess, no charming heroes, no villains with curly mustaches - this is a film that wanders at its own pace in its own direction. It says a whole lot by saying very little at all. If your kids are into Fellini and Jim Jarmusch I'm sure this is the matinee for them - otherwise skip this and go crazy at Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs....
The Ugly: Nah. Can't think of anything. I liked this movie too much.
The Verdict: Beautiful. Melancholy. Unpredictable. And completely inaccessible to the kids you're going to be dragging to this movie with you. My advice is to take them anyway - at least give them an early idea of what really terrific film-making looks and sounds like.
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