Return to reviews index
Maurice Sendak’s much loved picture book Where the Wild Things Are is only nine sentences long and tells the story of a little boy who gets really cross, has exciting adventures with some vaguely-threatening-but-ultimately-benevolent monsters, and returns home in time to find his supper still warm on the table. Spike Jonze’s film adaptation turns this fairly straightforward celebration of the power of the imagination into a strange, unsettling, but incredibly beautiful study of childhood, and the pain and misery which often comes with it. The little boy Max, played by the rather wonderfully named Max Records, is lonely and seething with unhappiness and frustration. His sister’s too busy with growing up to take much notice of him, and Mom, though affectionate enough, is preoccupied with dating Mark Ruffalo. So Max spends most of his time alone, lost in his imagination and desperately seeking to be the centre of some world. After a fight with his mother, when he finally explodes with rage at all the misery and dysfunction at home, Max runs away and sails to a strange, bleak island populated by large Muppet-like creatures. Except unlike the Muppets, these Wild Things are almost universally incredibly fucked-up: massive furry clumps of insecurity, anxiety and unhappiness. They bicker and fight a lot, and hurt each other without really meaning to, and generally mooch about in a state of permanent gloom. Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini, which is unsettling if you’re a Sopranos fan and used to hearing him say things like, “Shut up and die, motherf***er” all the time) is the de facto leader of the clan, and Max instantly relates to his vivid imagination and impulsive passion for life. Carol is hopelessly in love with KW, a red-headed loner longing for freedom and new experiences. There’s also Douglas, a sort of mournful looking goat, who resonated for being just an incredibly sad character, belittled and ignored by all the others.  They’re all so desperate for guidance and the reassurance that everything’s going to be OK that they eagerly accept Max as their King, despite the fact that he’s just a kid in Converse and a grubby wolf costume. There’s a genuinely touching scene when Max is persuading the Things of his immense powers, and one of them asks hopefully: “Will you keep all the sadness out?”, and Max replies: “I have a sadness shield which keeps out all the sadness.” Out of context, that sounds horribly twee but it captures the weirdly beautiful way in which children think, which makes a refreshing change to films like (500) Days of Summer which insist that the role of children is to be all wise and knowing and nauseatingly precocious. But despite Max’s best efforts to make everyone happy, things soon start to go wrong as the Things’ insecurities, jealousies and conflicts spin out of control and it becomes clear that Max is in fact just “a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king”. At this point the film takes on a rather different tone, as Max’s new friends, angry and disappointed that their trust has been betrayed, become increasingly volatile and threatening. What I found most unsettling was the almost unrelenting sense that at any minute something truly horrible was about to happen. It’s probably something to do with the constant undercurrent of violence – these monsters seem awfully keen on ripping up trees and hurling boulders around and dismembering each other. And so, in the scene when they all pile on top of each other and go to sleep in a big furry mass, instead of enjoying this rather touching moment I was peering at the screen from between my fingers, convinced that Max was about to get crushed to a pulp or horribly suffocated. This being a PG and all, the likelihood of that happening is slim, although some of the incidents in this film is so traumatising it would hardly surprise some. Spike Jonze obviously understands how completely horrible and hurtful children can sometimes be. For instance, there’s a scene when Max suggests a game of ‘let’s throw giant rocks at each other’ to pass the time, and everyone’s having an amazing time until one of the Things gets badly hurt and the whole tone sinks from joyful to incredibly painful and sad in a number of seconds. Spike Jonze seems to be presenting the rather bleak view that, far from being an exhilarating escape from the drudgeries of everyday life, the world of our imagination and fantasies is no less bewildering, messed-up and frightening than reality often is. I guess I can understand what all the outraged critics were going on about when they said that this “isn’t a children’s film”. Imagine if Dorothy and Toto, instead of arriving in an amazingly multi-coloured land of Munchkins and witches and flying monkeys, had turned up in Oz only to discover that, oh wait, this is actually really shit, let’s just go back to our depressing and dreary lives in Kansas? Not that I want to give the impression that this film is just a relentless grim fest, because there are many genuinely uplifting, joyful moments which perfectly capture the simple exhilarating pleasures which make life so wonderful; jumping up as high as you can and landing in a huge pile of leaves or running hand-in-hand through a forest. I suspect that this film will inevitably end up being adopted by irritating “oh look, I’m so quirky” trendies, (I mean, they’ve already started selling WTWTA T-shirts in Urban Outfitters, which is probably a bad sign) but that aside, this really is a wonderful film with many many beautiful moments - too many to mention here (suffice to say that the ending scene when Carol waves a tearful goodbye to Max on the shore affected me just as much as anything in Before Sunrise or The Last Picture Show or My Neighbour Totoro. It’s rare to find a film that manages to evoke the joy of seeing the world through a child’s eyes without being condescending or sentimental, but Where the Wild Things Are does it perfectly. And so, despite being bleak and painful to watch at times, it remains one of the most uplifting and touching films that I’ve seen for a very long time. |
