Where The Wild Things Are. A review by James Cox

Where The wild Things Are. A review by James Cox.



It has taken five years for Being John Malkovich director, Spike Jonze, to pitch, film and package a feature adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.
The book itself evokes murmurs of excitement from a non-specific generation of fans, enthused by the instantly iconic illustrations of mystical beasts encountered by precocious child run away, Max, on a fantastical island.
Film land has been awash with rumours of troubled sets and back room disharmony. Release dates have been chalked and erased, leaving a grubby trail of expectancy in their wake.
Now finally, it’s here, rendered in a beautiful marriage of art direction, CGI and quaint puppetry, painstakingly angled towards fleshing out Sendak’s diminuitive, yet poignant read.
The film starts in chaotic fashion, with young Max tearing down the stairs, in his iconic wolf costume.
Instantly the world of Sendak’s Wild Things, jagged illustration and pastel shades, clashes with an unmistakeable dose of Jonze guerilla realism.
Here is Max, a boy searching for his place in a life riddled with petty disappointments and pragmatic compromises. He is creative and lively, seeking the attention craved by a minor, and as his hard earned igloo fort is destroyed in a boisterous snowball fight with older kids, his big sister refusing to comfort him, and his mother selfish enough to couple her maternal affections with a need for an adult social life, we realise which world this films inhabits. It is one seen through the fractured rationale of a lonely child trying to understand grown-ups.
Shouldering the newly acquired knowledge that the sun is dying out – an unsubtle aside from a science teacher – Max lashes out at his mother, dons the wolf costume and disappears into the night.
Alone, and unrestrained, his imagination offers him a boat, which Max uses to navigate through turbulent waters to the rocky shores of a mystery island.
Max approaches the shaggy inhabitants as he does adults, back in the real world – at first with caution and fear, and then with wreckless abandon, running toward them in a breathless sprawl, legs buckling beneath him.
From here on in the island becomes a plotless mess, which is precisely the point. It skates on the dream logic and fleeting sense of an over excited child. Max and the Wild Things hatch grand plans without agenda, games are made up on the spot, but swelling in the background like an orchestral drone is the old adage: What starts off as fun and laughter, often ends in tears.
The Wild Things seem to embody Max’s disparate emotions: a breathless need for fun and chaos, a confused temper and a scared goat, lost in a world of clumsy giants.
It is within this motley dynamic that the James Gandolfini voiced, Carol, emerges as a dominant, and dangerous companion for Max’s quest for identity. Carol searches for harmony among his friends; vying for unity among the Wild Things, as Max vies for unity within himself.
On the island we see through Max’s eyes, and as a result understand as little about this world as Max does the real one.
The dialogue is surreal and disconnected, and brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s Theatre of The Absurd, as evoked in his classic stage play “Waiting For Godot”. Like Godot, characters are fluid and rather more unimportant than the message they carry. The relationships between the Wild Things are nothing more than decoration to a Jungian parable about the turbulent inner mind of a kid.
As the messy narrative unfolds, it is driven by tone, rather than plot, and the sinister air of the final third will both confuse and unsettle younger viewers as the action switches between Max’s wonderment and horror towards tempestuous nature of the Wild Things
Like a David Lynch directors cut of Sesame Street, Where the Wild Things Are never bows to expectation. To put it crudely, the wildest beast on that island is the storm in Max’s head.
And what a beautiful storm it is too.
Jonze and cinematographer Lance Acord create a naturalistic and patchwork children’s adventure, dispelling the thick key-lined, primary coloured Disneyfication of childhood nostalgia. It is naturally lit, with hazy sunsets and jagged shadows. The beasts themselves, forged by the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, and layered with CGI expressions, are a spectacle themselves, as they run and jump and laugh and roar.
Max’s muddied wolf costume is evidence enough of the painstaking appreciation for the source material, right down to the wizened whiskers protruding from the hood.
Of the few human performances, Max Records (playing Max) is outstanding both in his precociousness and his naivety and Catherine Keener marries her dual role as doting matriarch and authoritarian with aplomb. This is aided by the economical handling of the ‘real world’ sequences in both the intro and the coda. So much is conveyed in such little time and never failing to be visually impressive.
James Gandolfini gives a subtle, but hearty vocal performance, layering Carol with a childish ethos and turning on the Soprano rage in terrifying flashes of the darker side of the Wild Things.
The visuals will be enough to impress any viewer, although younger audiences will sense the bleakness long before the end credits.
It is a successful exercise in fleshing out the confused psyche and creative mind of a child, and manages to convey the intrinsic fear and irrational train of consciousness driving their seemingly chaotic actions. With all this considered, I was also surprised to find a few genuine laughs and a comedic savvy about the film.
Also successful are the quiet and tender moments, as Max dictates a story to a dewy eyed Keener, as he lays under her desk admiring his mothers feet with the observant wonder only a child can muster.
Whether this piece of cinematic art will be a crowd pleaser, is a big question. It plays out to no particular audience, abandoning any intention of being child friendly and, often, asking too much of a sceptical adult audience who must be willing to leave any desire for coherent narrative, driven dialogue or any discernible plot, outside the movie theatre.
This is a visceral experience, but one laden with ideas and pathos.
If you want to work for it, there’s an unpolished gem of a film in store for you, every bit as beautiful as the early trailers hinted at, with enough ideas to write a three page review (see above).
But it is, perhaps, wise not to expect the frivolous , giddy, banana-boat ride you may have hoped for, but instead embrace a visually stunning think-piece, celebrating the dying embers of innocence in the creative mind of a child.