Review: Where The Wild Things Are
Spike Jonze Pulls Off Big Screen Adaptation of Classic Book
Oct 15, 2009
There are many reasons Where The Wild Things Are is a great book -- the utter brevity and simplicity of Maurice Sendak's prose, beautiful illustrations, a fundamental truth to the fierceness and imagination of childhood. Each of those qualities counts as one more reason we all had to fear a film adaptation of the book.
Hollywood has a tendency to ruin great kids books (three Dr. Seuss movies and counting, The Polar Express, Jumanji to a certain extent) by touting a bankable name with little or no resemblance to the original material. But, against all odds, Where The Wild Things Are stands apart from these misfires.
Because, for whatever reason, Warner Brothers Pictures gave a prospective cash cow to Spike Jonze and let him run away with the show. And here's the real miracle -- they pulled it off.
Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are is a Film About Childhood, Not a Child's Film
Since the film started shooting back in 2005, Where The Wild Things Are has gone through a lot of murky waters -- there were even rumblings of dumping Jonze and re-shooting the whole picture. Time will tell (shortly enough) if the box office receipts add up the way Warner Bros. would like them to. For now, the studio can take pride in the fact they took a financial gamble in return for what is largely a beautiful, iconoclastic film.
Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers extrapolate naturally from Sendak's book, creating a child's fantasy land of glee and tantrums, dreams and nightmares come to life. The back story given is thankfully minimal - just enough to set the stage for Max's departure into the land of the wild things.
Projecting Family Through Fantasy in Each and Every Wild Thing
In the original book, we don't ever see Max's family (we read his mother calling him "Wild Thing!" before she sends him to bed), but there was never much of a question that the wild things become Max's proxy family in his dream world. Jonze and Eggers go one step further and create a complicated string of characters out of their wild things, escaping any simple Bruno Bettelheim-type analysis.
Two incidents propel Max (Max Records) to throw a tantrum and then run off in his wolf costume: first, the betrayal of his sister in a winter snowball skirmish, and then, the perceived betrayal of his mother (Catherine Keener, brief but good) as she brings a date (Mark Ruffalo) home for dinner. The whole child-as-casualty-of-divorce thing works because we never see Dad, and therefore the circumstances remain subtle.
Immediately, Max attaches to the wild thing Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) as a sort of father figure. Quickly, though, it becomes apparent that these wild things are as much children as they are parental figures. The wild thing "family" so to speak, is in disarray.
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