Secondhand Reviews: "Where The Wild Things Are"

 I'm a bit too old to have had Maurice Sendak's classic children's picture book "Where The Wild Things Are" as favorite childhood reading of my own. However, I do recall reading it to my nieces and nephews while babysitting, and when this film was announced I was among the many who thought something along the lines of "How in the world can they possibly make a film of this book?" Well, I guess you could say they really haven't, as such, but they have made a films clearly INSPIRED BY the Sendak book that if it (clearly) isn't a literal translation of that book to the screen, at the very least captures an amazing amount of its spirit.

It's the story of Max, a young boy who just isn't getting any attention at home... his so-called "friends" ignore him, his sister won't play with him, and his divorced mother never has enough time for him either. Max has become more than a little of the angry, acting-out "wild thing" himself, until one night when he simply has enough, and runs out of the house after a fight with mom, eventually finding himself far, far away in a strange land inhabited by gigantic plush-toy-looking beasts who adopt him as their long-awaited king. It seems Max has found a bunch of kindred spirits... but things are not all what they seem.

This movie surprised me on a number of levels, and let me make one thing perfectly clear (as Richard Nixon used to say)... I don't see nearly enough movies that surprise me on any level, so it gets major points just for that. For one thing, the "wild things" do, yes, look wild, but they also appear very kid-friendly and cutesy, so I was very surprised by the degree of the film's darkness. The society the wild things have established appears to have seen its better days and is slowly falling apart... apprarently one of the reasons they're looking for a king... and there's a real sense of sadness that in some of the wild things (such as Carroll, voiced by "The Sopranos"'s James Gandolfini) actually at times borders on depression. Real-world concerns are definitely not unknown here.

And I'll admit that one thing that bothered me early on was how blatantly self-centered Max was: his family doesn't devote every single second of their waking life to his needs and therefore the universe is unjust? Oh, cry me a river!! And his mother so OBVIOUSLY loves her son and cares about him that when Max goes all crazy because of one single incident I almost wanted to yell at him. But I couldn't help but smile when I realized that the whole "wild things" society is a clear parallel to Max's home life... Carroll is obvious Max, taking unreasonable anger at the slightest thing, and as Max starts to lecture Carroll he begins to realize what he himself has been doing to others. And the device of having Catherine Keener as BOTH Max's mom and the voice of one of the wild things helps make things a little clearer. It's actually a very clever way of handling the situation.

The film is very well cast: besides Gandolfini and Keener the cast includes Forrest Whitaker as another of the Wild Things and Mark Ruffalo as the potential boyfriend of Max's mom. This last is an indication of how seriously director Spike Jonze takes every little aspect of this film: the boyfriend is only in a couple of scenes and has hardly any dialogue, why bother getting an actor of any realy renown for the part? But that's not the way Jonze is running things. I should have known that there was no way Spike Jonze, the man who gave us "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation", among others, would ever make a conventional kids' movie, too. In its own way, "Where The Wild Things Are" is just as weird and hallucinatory as his other work, although this time fully capable of being appreciated by kids as well. (Though, come to think of it, a lot of children's classics are pretty weird and hallucinatory... I mean, really, have you ever actually payed attention to "Alice In Wonderland" or "The Wizard Of Oz"?)

One of the great cliches of children's movies... one that's almost never actually true... is that the movie in question "isn't just a kids' movie, it's for the whole family". In "Where The Wild Things Are", that's actually the case. It's a surprisingly impressive and effective story about the "wild" side of all people, both adults and children, how that can sometimes get in the way of our own best interests, and how we can grow up and become wiser and more compassionate without having to actually tame or eliminate that wild side. A lot for one movie to try to accomplish, especially when it's also attempting to be entertaining and funny and filled with visual wonder. The fact that in "Where The Wild Things Are" all of this is accomplished definitely make it far and away the most impressive "children"'s movie of the year.