All Things Must Pass

I can say so many nice things about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are that it's hard for me to admit that the film doesn't "click". It's missing a mystery factor that subverts all its prettiness, all its thematic density, all its technical accomplishments, all its wonderful performances and all its love-lettering to Maurice Sendak's original book.

As I'm sure you all know, the original story is that of a young boy named Max who is sent to bed without dinner. There he imagines a tropical island populated by strange creatures that crown him their king. Its text is minimal, allowing the gorgeous watercolors to tell the simple story.

Spike Jonze has been working on his film adaptation for the better part of a decade (if my sources are correct, he started working on it after Being John Malkovich and before Adaptation.). Plagued by casting problems, disastrous test screenings (I've heard tell of children running from the theater in tears) and unhappy studio heads, the finished product sits in front of us.

Spike Jonze's story is a bit different from Sendak's original, in that, being a two-hour film, it's fleshed out. All the same elements are there, but they're dramatized in a way that the book was not.

The Wild Things are now more acute renderings of Max's id, most of them given a single personality trait like Alexander (Paul Dano), who represents Max's sense of rejection, displayed earlier in the film when his sister and her friends crush his painstakingly crafted snow fort.

The two Wild Things that are given rounder development are Carol (James Gandolfini) who is Max in everything but name, and KW (Lauren Ambrose) who is clearly meant to represent Max's sister. Max assumes the role of his own mother (Catherine Keener) when he is crowned king, and we are given the first of two fascinating themes: the responsibility of a parent in dealing with the developing mind of a child. Max's mother has to deal with so many conflicting personalities emerging from Max that she is essentially raising a group of "wild things" instead of a single child. That's something that many adults don't appreciate about their children.

The other theme, and I'm paraphrasing Bill Waterson here, is "anyone who remembers childhood as an idyllic time was clearly never a child". People tend to compare their level of responsibility now to their level of responsibility as a child and concur that childhood must have been fantastic. It never fails that they can't remember how crushing childhood was. We had the same social issues we have now (only "trying to get laid" is replaced with "getting invited to a birthday party") and none of the freedoms. It was oppressive, we were not understood and we had to deal with a emotions we had no idea how to cope with. In so many ways, my life now is infinitely easier than my childhood.

But it passes, as all things do. Whatever pain Max feels, the film argues, will be offset at the end of his life by his happy memories. Death isn't a good thing, but the clarity you find at the end of your experience is. Max can indulge his wild side and hide in his own mind, but in the end, his fleeting childhood is better spent with his mother and her hot soup.

Spike Jonze shoots the whole film hand-held and from Max's eye level, giving it a sense of magic and wonder that isn't often thought of when I use the words "hand-held and eye-level". His landscapes and compositions are magnificent, but the framing bounces along like the steps of a child.

The performances are all fantastic, especially Max Records as Max and James Gandolfini as Carol. Gandolfini especially is acting in a giant puppet and makes Carol a sad little kid with razor-sharp claws and violent tendencies. His performance is tragic and is the sort of thing the Academy is sure to ignore.

Now that I've said all those nice things, it's time to say some mean things. As I've said before, some mystery factor is missing. I'm not articulate enough to say what it is for sure, but I can speculate that it's the script. While the strengths of the story are drawn from Sendak's book, the weaknesses are likely from the original screenplay. The middle section of the film is weak, with a lot of elementary school drama between the Wild Things that's fine in theory, but we don't have to watch it for forty minutes to get the idea that the Wild Things are Max's peers. The visually stunning scenes like Carol's city made of sticks are offset by dozens of scenes of the Wild Things arguing amongst themselves. My only wish is that the writers could have conjured scenes to move forward a story, like the fort-building, instead of what amounts to scene after scene of the Wild Things shooting the shit with Max.

It's far more detrimental than it sounds. Despite everything nice I can say about the film, it's still indulgent and flabby where it should be sharp and dramatic. I can spot it the marvelous imagery, the emotive CGI, the fantastic performances, but in the end it's in the service of a script that wasn't able to flesh out Maurice Sendak's ten sentences as well as it should have.

8/10

I can't really decide if that's harsh or kind, so why don't you read the goddamn review and see what I have to say? Assigning a rating to this movie is damn hard.