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Where the Wild Things Are
Monsters are not suited to long-term relationships
2009
Review: November 7, 2009
Director: Spike Jonze
Starring: Max Records, James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Catherine Keener
Sure!
THE SETUP:
Kid enters a magical world where he works out some of his issues.
DISCUSSION:
So here comes this adaptation of the enduringly popular children’s book, that apparently author Maurice Sendak ASKED Spike Jonze to direct after seeing Being John Malkovich. Jonze wrote the screenplay with hip novelist Dave Eggers, which has the challenge of expanding a largely visual book with only 14 lines into a 90-minute movie. How did they rise to the task? We’ll find out, right after these important messages!
The movie opens with handheld footage of this kid, Max, running through his house after the family dog. He goes outside and tunnels a cave into the plowed-up snow along the road. He tries to interest his older teen sister in seeing it, but she’s on the phone and couldn’t care less. He begins a snowball fight with her and her friends which they playfully return. Max runs to his newly-made cave, feeling very self-satisfied, until one of the other kids, in play, jumps on it and smashes through it. Max is anguished and starts crying. His sister sees this, but it doesn’t stop her piling into a car with her friends and driving off.
Max goes into her room and stomps all over her carpet and bed, getting it wet with melting snow. Then his mother [Catherine Keener] comes home and, after being dismayed at the mess Max made, has a nice warm scene with him where she takes time for him, even though she has a lot of work to do that evening. The only evidence we see of a father, now long gone, is a globe with a plaque inscribed: “This whole globe is yours.” A few days later, Max is dressed in the white animal costume famous from the book, and wants attention, even though his mom has a potential boyfriend over. He throws a tantrum, ostensibly about dinner, but really about wanting to draw attention away from the date, his Oedipal rival. He gets in a fight with his mother, bites her, she calls him a “wild thing,” and he runs in angry, crying rage out of the house
He runs and soon comes to an ocean with a sailboat right there, takes off in it and is soon sailing far away. He eventually lands on an island, where he watches the monsters we know from the books. Carol, the big main one from the book, is systematically destroying all of their houses, in part out of rage that this female monster he has a special thing for, KW, has left their little group to hang out with “Bob and Terry.” Max eventually appears to them, meets most of them, and tells them that he is a king from a distant land. Carol asks if he can “defeat the loneliness and keep out all the sadness.” He says sure thing, so they make him their own king. Then follows the wild rumpus, where they smash their houses, jump on each other, and do all manner of infantile but fun things, before finally running down to the shore to watch the dawn. Then the wild things smash trees and jump on each other some more, until their bodies surround Max, like his snow cave. Inside, he has a talk with KW, who has a has a mewling voice and affectless, aloof air, very much like his distant sister. To me, KW perfectly captured the essence of those emotionally-distant, often narcissistic people who remain unimpressed with everything, and can become incredibly magnetic by virtue of just HOW removed they are. It is easy to see why Carol is fascinated with her, and Max too, for she echoes his sister in real life.
Later Carol takes Max across this desert of rolling dunes to a cave where he has constructed a little miniature city out of twigs, with little figures of all the wild things living happily, and him and KW together. Max says they can make a big new house that all of them can live in together, and there will be no secrets, and they can all sleep together in a big bunch. They go back and get right on it, eventually building a massive hollow sphere, like the globe Max’s dad got him. At one point Max accompanies KW through the dunes and to the shore, where she throws rocks at two owls—who turn out to be Bob and Terry. She apparently has to do this to get them out of the sky. They speak in squawks that only make sense to her [if they make sense at all]. When she brings them back and wants them to live with the group in the big globe, Carol has a fit and refuses. KW soon leaves again.
There are also a number of other wild things present that I haven’t mentioned, including Judith and Ira. Judith is a depressed, somewhat passive-aggressive, somewhat confrontational female, who is always saying things like “oh, well you know me, I always go too far” and “Why would anyone listen to me?” She asks Max if Carol is his favorite, and when he tells her that he loves them all equally, she calls that bullshit. Soon the wild things grow disillusioned in Max. They have a big dirt clod fight in which some of them actually get hurt. They start bickering and fighting. Eventually one of them gets Max to admit that he’s not actually a king, then tells him “Whatever you do, don’t let Carol know.” More happens, but eventually Max realizes that he has to go home, being a king if not all it’s cracked up to be, the life of fun and frolic with no responsibilities can only be taken so far, and numerous other crucially important life lessons that I dare not reveal to you here.
It was good, and gets better with repeated reflection. Jonze and Eggers have filled out the story with minor incident that seems important at the time and allows the film to have an overall momentum, but simultaneously remains innocuous enough that the focus stays on the character and emotion. This is no mean feat—you can imagine how if this had gotten into the hands of Robert Zemeckis or someone, we might be watching a war between two separatist factions of wild things, with big bullet-listed lessons at the end and maybe a musical number or three and closing theme song by Ashley Tisdale, entitled “Love (Is the Wildest Thing).” So it’s a minor miracle—especially given the great extent to which they had to expand the book—that they managed to deliver a movie that not only doesn’t seem packed with filler, but is engaging, moving, emotional, and intellectually stimulating. Look what happened to another children’s book with an extremely short text that had to be expanded into a feature—How the Grinch Stole Christmas, by America’s greatest living director, Ron Howard. I haven’t actually seen that, because I understand that if I did I would be forced to drive a knife into my own throat by the end of the first 30 minutes.
So obviously this film is following the well-worn Wizard of Oz template in which the kid falls asleep at the beginning, has a dream that reflects him processing thoughts about his life, then wakes up at the end, having had a revelation. But the strength of this film is that there’s not a pat, one-to-one corollary to each character in the dream world, they are splintered and refracted into each other, which seems both more interesting and more true-to-life. Max remains himself, but also seems to be split into Carol. His sister is mostly reflected by KW, but she also seems present in Judith [and similarly the mother seems to be present in both characters]. The absent father remains in the background like the silent Bull that remains on the sidelines, but also looms thematically in the form of the globe Max and Carol build, in big, strong Carol himself, and in Max’s projection of himself as the leader of this world where no parent or authority figure will show up and ruin your wild rumpus.
The few minutes of the film [20 at most] before Max enters his dream world also must be credited for how very economically they lay out the central relationships that will receive examination through the remainder of the film. We get a fairly clear sense of who the mother and sister are, and their relationship with Max. I also appreciate that the movie went out of its way to show the mother being patient and tender with Max before she has her blow up, so she doesn’t come off as a one-dimensional shrew, and Max’s processing of his feelings isn’t entirely based around her being mean once.
As for the psychological examination that makes up the majority of the movie, it is quite convincing to the mind of a ten-year-old, and doesn’t try to shape things too neatly for an adult audience. I liked that there were a lot of passive-aggressive, depressed adult wild thing characters [for the most part, the creatures come off like adults or older adolescents] that Max doesn’t understand. But the movie doesn’t advance his mental age by giving him the distance to even ask “Why are they like that?” To him, they’re just like that. KW remains appealing and magnetic, and Carol’s longing for her reflects Max’s wish to hang with his sister and her cool friends, and utter bewilderment why she doesn’t want to be with him. But again, the movie stays within his young perspective and the question is not resolved by the end, Max only learns that there are some things you just can’t understand and have to deal with.
I’m getting tired of saying laudatory things about this movie—being positive about anything for too long gives me shingles—but I should also mention that all the special effects, but especially the creatures themselves, are absolutely impeccable. Their appearance, and the whole looseness of the story, also opens the film for you to bring your own issues to it—for example, for me the film touched a lot on the intimacy one can have with animals, especially as a child, and the childhood feeling of wanting to escape from complicated, demanding people, and exist in the easier, intuitive world of animals.
One of the benefits of having a movie review website—aside from the non-stop sex, obviously—is that writing about a movie and having to reconstruct it for those one assumes haven’t seen it, sometimes it falls apart, and sometimes one realizes that it is even better put-together than one thought. That’s the case here. Over the course of writing this review, I’ve come to admire the movie even more, and now am eager to see it again. I can’t say kids under the age of 8 would really like it, but it is a very moving psychological movie for adults.
By the way, if you’ve ever asked yourself “Why do children’s movies have to be so awful, filled with such moronic action and loaded with such big tendentious lessons to learn at the end?” the negative user reviews of this movie on the IMDb will give you the answer: Because a large portion of parents want it that way.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you’re an adult and like psychological movies. If you have kids, I’d say they should be over 8.
