The best thing I can say about Where the Wild Things Are, and there are a number of compliments to be paid it, is that director Spike Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers aren’t after one of those daffy “innocence of children” pictures, where we’re invited to worship children for having yet to be corrupted by the ways of the adult world. Jonze’s lead, Max (Max Records) is unruly and chaotic and annoying, a troubled boy disturbed by family upheaval, channeling it through his models and stuffed animals and dog, tumbling down the stairs (in a marvelous early shot), crying at a slight provocation he started, and making a scene for his mother (Catherine Keener), who we see as overworked and trying her best to balance motherhood with some sort of personal life. (A lesser movie would condemn her for this.) I’ve read that Max is unsympathetic, but that conveys a troubling lack of feeling. I sympathized with him (I made similar scenes during my parents’ divorce when I was a similar age, and I’ve never quite forgiven myself for them) but can still allow that Max is an unformed, entitled, unintentional ass; which is why he goes to the island of the Wild Things, a land, as envisioned by Jonze and Eggers, of monsters in even greater need of therapy than Max. Elected their king, Max finds himself, as many protagonists of escape fantasies before him, navigating the ambiguous hurt feelings of others, allowing him to appreciate what his mother does in actuality everyday.
People who haven’t gone for Where the Wild Things Are, and there seem to be quite a few, have expressed irritation with the monsters, and their (constant) voicing aloud of the subtext of the picture. It can be tedious but it also fits; Where the Wild Thing Are is intimate in scope: its one boy’s afternoon of play, one boy’s working through a perceived slight exasperated by larger frustrations. The redundancy and obviousness is the closest the picture comes to Jonze and Eggers’ expressed idea of simply watching a kid play; and it’s relatively unflinching in the unappealing aspects. There are moments in the picture that are eye-rolling, you want to tell the monsters to shut up and grab a beer or a Nestle Quick or a Lean Cuisine or whatever it is they consume besides children, but this pounding, pounding, pounding obviousness, which would normally drive me up the wall, is in sync and eventually pays off. Jonze could have played fashionably obtuse notes for the critics, he could have made a beautiful E.T. for the audiences, but instead he made a (literally) dirtier fusion of the two, a jarringly unsentimental portrait of restlessness and uncertainty and that self-hate we grow up to believe only plagues us as adults.
The wild things themselves, featuring the voices of James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper and Catherine O’Hara, among others, are an approximation of what we think of when we wander our yards going on adventures as children. They’re artificial in an appealingly tangible way; they’re cuddly/fearsome expansions of the various toys we have laying around the bedroom. The monsters jump on barely deleted wires, they roar and claw and tumble in images that very literally link up to Max’s home life in the beginning. The voices have a poignant, soothing “mommy” quality that fuses with Max’s own doubt; they’re mommies and buddies at once, and Gandolfini, in particular, has a wonderful baby-confidant sing-song.
This is one of the few movies I can remember in recent years that understands children’s preoccupations with buildings forts and various other structures of blankets and pillows: the comfort of reducing your world to inches along with the reassurance of being surrounded by pretend friends of unquestioning loyalty. There are images in Where the Wild Things Are, of Max and his big monsters sleeping in piles, the boy in the center of their big, cushy, goofy bodies, and, later, of Max hiding in a maternal monster’s belly, that transcend the self-pitying moralizing that has alienated certain viewers. The ending, of Gandolfini’s monster running along the beach after Max, who must inevitably leave, is an earned heartbreaker; we’ve seen everything Max and these creatures have: warts and all.
There’s an undeniable guilt and self-flagellation evident in Spike Jonze’s movies, which include Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Jonze, along with Charlie Kaufman, who wrote his prior pictures (and played an uncredited role in Wild Things) distrust the usual glory of the artist clichés that dominate many movies (that excuse creative people of their indulgences as being redeemed by their talent). Jonze and Kaufman’s senses of play seem to be fading, their features are becoming morose and self-doubting. Kaufman’s directorial debut, last year’s Synecdoche, New York, is even more repetitive and relentless than Where the Wild Things Are, but that picture was convoluted and played art movie games to justify a man bedding virtually every respected actress in the industry while wallowing in his own misery. That picture was self-glorifying and self-castrating at the same time, and the effect was off-putting and almost pointless (there are worthwhile stretches). Where the Wild Things Are wallows too, but this indulgence is revealing of its hero, and you sense Jonze trying to work through something to create something deceptively plain and elemental. Jonze succeeds and fails in about equal measure. For all its intensity, the picture book by Maurice Sendak was richer, and in the end you can’t help but think that, for all of Jonze’s huffing and puffing, he isn’t telling you much you didn’t already know. Jonze and Kaufman might want to work together again, and maybe even have one scene in a picture where someone savors one unambiguously pleasurable moment. If artists this adored are this miserable, what the hell does that spell for the rest of us?
