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Directed by Spike Jonze
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Where the Wild
Things Are Who knew that the classic
book “Where the Wild Things Are” would be so scary to kids? My wife and I read it to all of them
and now they won’t read it to their own children because it’s too
scary. What’s going on
here? And then Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers put together a whole screenplay
(and novelization) of the book, taking it out of Max’s room and putting
it and him overseas and onto the shores of Australia. Do I not understand the power of
children’s tales?
Particularly one by a man who never had children of his own? Sure Maurice Sendak
is a genius, but if I love him blindly what does that make me? Probably just another film critic who
likes to vent. Jones and Eggers
have made fascinating changes, so much so that the film is completely unlike
the book. First they’ve
made Max (a wonderful newcomer named Max Records) nine years old instead of 5
or 6. For the film nine is
exactly the right age for the boy to whom all manner of things will happen. But let me be clear: The
fact is that the movie of “Where the Wild Things Are” is both sad
and scary, which is what the book is not – to me, any way -- and
although the film is not quite what we parents expected – that is, you
will cry as you watch it -- it is still well worth seeing – but please,
not with your two-year-old. Where
the book located everything that happened in Max’s room – when he
wore his wolf suit and was sent upstairs because he had ‘caused
mischief of one kind and another,’ first a jungle grew there, then he
sailed in a ship ‘almost over a year’ until he got to where the
wild things were. And then he
silenced them and they danced their great rumpus, then they made him their
king, then they didn’t want to let him go, but he knew that he wanted
to be back home, and he was, ‘ and his dinner was still
hot.’ The end. But the film is different;
we see Max’s life in greater detail than the book does, where the only
time we hear about his mother is when she sends him to bed without his
supper. But in the film, he has a
whole family; though no father, including an older sister, whom he wishes he
could make friends with, in the only way he knows,
which is to start a snowball fight with her and her friends – a bad
idea. And then he sees his
divorced mother (Catherine Keener) nuzzling on the living room sofa with her
boyfriend. No wonder he throws a
tantrum. So he runs away down the
street, and unlike the book, he finds a sailboat and sails away into the
ocean until he gets to the land of the Wild Things. And the Wild Things are a
reflection of human life; there are good friends, small hatreds, little
injustices, cliques, in a word all the things that make up human life and
society. One of the wild things
– Carol, voiced in a very smart switch by a
male -- James Gandolfini – seems to be the
center of the group. At first the
group welcomes Max, and even makes him their king; but the tensions among
them slowly come out and Max, who unlike the book has different relationships
with each of them, cannot find a way to paper over those differences, so he
does the very smart thing by getting back in his boat and sailing home. So I was unexpectedly
impressed with the way in which Jonze and Eggers
took a classic that was complete in itself and made
a whole new film out of it. And
in spite of my suspicions that they would do a bad job by simply showing an
animated version of the book, the “Wild Things” they have come up
with are legitimate, fascinating creatures – as are the humans in the
film – and completely convincing.
Older children and adults should find the film well worth while. |