Where the Wild Things Are

A Film Freak Central Film Review by Walter Chaw

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (2009)
**** (out of four)

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starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, Lauren Ambrose, Mark Ruffalo
screenplay by Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak
directed by Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are is the product of an artist who may only be able to assimilate art and the creation of it through the filter of celluloid and the music that animates its flickers. More, there's the suggestion in its depth of emotion that this may be the only way Jonze knows to communicate at all, and so he tasks it to capture the breadth of human experience. If the "film brats" of the New American Cinema were the first reared on a diet of the French New Wave and critical theory, this new post-modernism to which Jonze belongs consists of artists reared on the entire panoply of popular culture...and maybe nothing else. What other explanation is there for the elasticity and strangeness of films by people like Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino? They create works that strive towards the ineffable, seemingly unaware of film's limitations and therefore undaunted by ideas of what's possible.

There are no extra words in Where the Wild Things Are, no monologues, no voiceovers, no explanations. There's no help. Instead, there's this crystalline adaptation of the beloved, minimalist, almost archetypal children's book by Maurice Sendak that contains the same hidden depths, poses the same unanswerable questions, and ultimately provides the same measure of terrifying insight into children, parents, and the horror of growing up. Sendak has long been associated with Holocaust remembrance, and the film feels like prayers written on concentration-camp walls. In structure, it reminds of Nicholas Ray's phantasmagoria of childhood's end, Rebel Without a Cause, complete with protagonists in search of fathers, teachers preaching the end of times, broken families, and finally the tenuous handshake-restoration of society. But its subtlety--there's not a syllable wasted along the way of a wondrously displacing use of image, coupled with a remarkable soundtrack (courtesy Karen O and Carter Burwell)--is equal parts haunting and exhilarating.

Max (Max Records) is a kid. He gets frustrated, he feels lonely, he gets mad, he feels sad. His mom (Catherine Keener--a specific muse for a particular kind of sadness) has her own frustrations, feels lonely, gets mad, feels sad. One night, Max tells Mom a story and she types it into her computer--and then they fight, and Max sails away over a year and a day and finds himself among the Wild Things. Of them, Carol (James Gandolfini) is almost as angry as Max and KW (Lauren Ambrose) is almost as sad as Mom, while the rest of them, voiced by a pantheon of fine actors (Chris Cooper, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano, Catherine O'Hara), are each complex representations of causes and effects. Yet Where the Wild Things Are is different from The Wizard of Oz, not so easily explained away as projections of a disturbed psyche or some fantasy of escape. Jonze offers no platitudes to soften its waves of disturbance, regarding them instead with the appropriate terror. The Wild Things appear to have, indeed, eaten every child King preceding Max; their island lair is fraught with real menace. When they're wounded they remain so, and when they build forts, they look exactly as improbably lovely as an Andy Goldsworthy ephemera.

Visually gorgeous, perfect in its way, Where the Wild Things Are leaves the lingering aftertaste of an intense, base savagery. It's as elemental as children: capricious, furious one moment, loving, soft the next. As their King, Max moves his Wild Things to play at families and war (creation, then destruction), toying with what it's like to have godlike powers and suffering human consequences in the wielding of them before arriving at a point that demonstrates the fleeting luxury of being small. It's about being a kid. Given that Jonze and Dave Eggers wrote it, it probably shouldn't come as such a surprise that its insights into the damages of growing up for kids and parents are as sharp as they are. There are moments of brilliance in this picture (a scene amongst miniatures; a moment after the war where Max learns about what happens when someone is hit with a rock; a farewell that reminds of the end of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man), but, really, the film from the first frame to the last is one extended tingle of recognition. This is exactly the sort of movie of which a vocal minority complains the American film industry is incapable, although Where the Wild Things Are is one of a kind, the rare work of art in any media that actually evokes the experience of sadness, the sensation of melancholy, the mechanism of regret. We're lucky to have it.-Walter Chaw

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