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Printer-Friendly ModeWhere are they?
October 19, 2009 —
Hollywood movie-making is a business like any other, focused on net revenues and profit margins.
Each year, studios pump out title after title of bland or obnoxious children’s films because they are a safe investment.
The costs are moderate, and the returns are enormous; any movie, most parents seem to think, is as good as another if it distracts that six year-old for a few hours.
Those parents may want to think twice about bringing their kids to Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. It is slow. It lacks spectacle and explosions.
There are no flatulence jokes. It deals with dark areas of childhood that we all remember but that some prefer to gloss over: The fear, the loneliness, the anxiety and the violence.
And it is unremittingly beautiful. Jonze somehow convinced one studio — Warner Brothers — to take a chance on his project of turning Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book into a feature film.
Though critically lauded for his previous two films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Jonze was by no means a safe bet.
Reportedly, Warner spent much of this year begging Jonze to brighten his film’s themes and scale back his vision — one that cost the studio about $100 million. Thankfully for movie lovers, he refused.
Fans of the book can rest assured that all the original dialogue is included unexpurgated. Of course, that amounts to two sentences of the ten total sentences in the text. Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers made one major change — moving the monsters’ home from the jungle to an island — while greatly elaborating on Max’s back story and the ways of the wild things.
Still, all the changes are true to the spirit, if not each letter, of the book.
I remember it as a gripping story I couldn’t put down, even though the images terrified me. It seems Jonze did too, as every scene with the monsters holds an undertow of menace and danger.
The story follows a 9-year-old boy named Max (Max Records) as he grapples with the pain and alienation of life.
Max’s parents have divorced, and his father has gone. His mother (Catherine Keener) tries to make time for him but her attention is consumed by work and a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo).
Max’s teenage sister ignores him for her friends, who reduce Max to bitter tears by destroying his snow fort. Max is so lonely he talks to a picket fence, pretending to play games with it.
The boy’s frustration explodes one night when, donning his bushytailed wolf suit, he climbs on the table and bellows at his mother, “I’m going to eat you up!” Chaos ensues and Max flees the house, running through the night until he encounters a mysterious dinghy on the shore. The boat carries him safely through drenching rains and a terrible storm to the fantasy land of the wild things.
The monsters themselves are an achievement in special effects, seamlessly combining ten-foot high puppet costumes with computer animation to provide a convincingly real look to the creatures. Max’s own thoughts and feelings are embodied in the actions and words of the wild things, his own inner battles enacted before his eyes. The monsters, petulant and illogical, talk and act like children. The monsters’ forest is Max’s unconscious, a dreamscape where his id runs unrestrained from parental and social control.
Director of photography Lance Acord has created a stunning look for the film, perfectly fitting its themes. Night scenes are shot in lucid blues and sharp, shiny blacks, while day scenes take place in a perpetual dawn, the sun hanging low in the sky and soaking the film in its slanting rays that ripple off the mellow tans, browns and golds.
But the star of the movie is Records, and all other elements (including actors) are in his orbit.
Jonze’s affection for the boy is palpable in every frame, imbuing the movie with a rare warmth and love. The camera’s gaze never lets us forget that Records is the Every-Child, whether he is gaping in wide-eyed innocence, startling with outbursts of anarchic destructiveness, or merely beaming into the lens with a heart-melting, beatific grace.
The movie’s weakness is its pacing in the last third, when the lack of narrative incident begins to wear on the viewer. Still, this weakness, too, is true to the director’s vision of avoiding the conventional.
Where the Wild Things Are is not concerned with telling a story as much as exploring the raw emotions of a child.
In this way, it is in the select company of masterpieces such as The 400 Blows and E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial — movies about childhood that are true to its messy complexities, and have the power to make grown-ups feel the profundities of their 9-year-old hearts once more.