Where the Wild Things Are
In Maurice Sendak’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, young Max conquers the Wild Things by staring into their yellow eyes without blinking. He is not afraid of the Wild Things and becomes their King. The whole story takes a few hundred words to tell, so adapting it into a feature-length motion picture could be a bit of a problem. Luckily for us, Spike Jonze solves this problem and many others with his brilliant 2009 film.
Where the Wild Things Are is an incredibly unique movie. It looks unique thanks to some incredible visual effects and its massive budget, but Jonze pulls things far beyond the visual in expanding Sendak’s work and building on themes of childhood and emotions. I wouldn’t suggest that this is a kid’s movie, necessarily, but that it is a family movie in that it has something to say to each member of today’s fractured units.
Max (Max Records) is a lonely boy who gets by thanks to his outrageous imagination. He has a special relationship with his mother (Catherine Keener), but she is moving on in the world by dating a younger man (Mark Ruffalo). We aren’t sure and we aren’t told what happened to Max’s father, but the rest of the movie does well to fill in some of those gaps allegorically. Max, of course, struggles with the appearance of this younger man and with what he believes to be his mother’s divided attention. In a huff one night, he runs away.
Max’s imagination kicks into high gear and he ends up taking a small boat across a body of water to a strange island. On the island he comes across six large and strange creatures. One of them, Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), takes an instant liking to him. It isn’t long before the creatures proclaim Max to be their king. Max soon discovers that “ruling” these creatures is a lot of hard work, what with their various flaws and tantrums, and he eventually decides to head for home.
Jonze is working with a lot of layers here and he somehow makes it all work out wonderfully. At the core of the story is a basic tale of childhood imagination, with Max’s wild thoughts creating these Wild Things. But something deeper and darker drives the existence of these creatures in Max’s imagination, as one might imagine, and we are given constant clues about how these Wild Things came into existence and what they represent.
On one level is the utterly impulsive and self-absorbed behaviour of these creatures. Max’s perception of the world, in light of his mother’s dating for instance, has given him to believe, rightly, that many adults are just out for themselves and can’t reign in their egos long enough to cooperate on something as simple as, say, building a giant fort. The self-delusion, self-destructiveness (Carol’s threat to eat his feet if he doesn’t get his way) and general jealousy leads to countless problems.
On another level is how these elements relate to the construction of a family and how fractured families become as a result of ego, anger, impatience, delusions, and misplaced emotion. Each of the Wild Things struggles with where to vent, serving to create rifts in their relationships. Carol, for instance, finds divine pleasure in destroying homes and does all sorts of verbal acrobatics to prove it to the group. This is reflective of many things within a broken family unit, of course, including the justification of abusive behaviour.
Visually this movie is stunning, but it’s the more reflective meanings that really drew me in and made it something truly special. The continuous disagreements brought out by Max’s perception of things really drives home Jonze’s larger, bolder mission with Where the Wild Things Are. And, as a result, this movie manages to stand among the year’s very best.
Trailer:
