In which youth is not wasted on the young, just on the unimaginative
I might have cried at the end if I was watching it with the intelligence of a 17-year-old and the emotional sensitivity of a seven-year-old. But visionary director Spike Jonze has not made a children’s film (even though the video would be shelved in the children’s section), he has made a film about childhood. From that perspective, "Where the Wild Things Are" glows with the warmth of childhood (maybe it’s Max’s fuzzy wolf costume and the Wild Things’ furry bodies) but also trots into a much darker territory of a child’s imagination.
What Jonze has created in his 90-minute adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s nursery classic is an ephemeral visualization of a grown-up’s retrospection on his nine-year-old mind. Jonze re-tells the story with more vivid and pressing imagery: a storm, a school children skirmish, a mother’s anger, the Wild Things’ irrational rage and violence. The story is straightforward: Max (Max Records) sails away across an ocean to the Wild Things’ island after he bickers with his conflicted mother (Catherine Keener), who is absent-minded on one hand, but also encourages Max’s wild imagination. The Wild Things crown Max as king; the rest is Max’s adventure in discovering lessons from being king.
A child’s mind could take more difficult materials than most adults perceive (ironically, adults were once children). From the beginning, Max is confronted with the harsh reality beyond a supposedly blameless childhood. I don’t blame Max. His teacher opens a lecture with "Now of course the sun won’t always be here to keep us warm. It, like all things, will die." This is also one reason why "Where the Wild Things Are" has procured a loyal hipster following. But more importantly, this should indicate why the film is not recommended for children of over-protective parents who insist on a giddily innocent primary education and anyone who still believes in Disney.
The superb dialogue by Jonze and Dave Eggers bolsters the moral of the story throughout. But because the lessons come from the dialogue, they could be too implicit for a kid to understand. Max’s imaginary voyage is full of evidence of the anxiety at the threshold between the recklessness allowed by nursery and an unexpected responsibility that comes with power. The fort he and his Wild-Thing friends built has "robots to do stuff for us, our own detective agency… and a machine that can cut our legs off and that way we can float." It would also automatically cut the brains off of any uninvited being who enters. The ability to reconcile the two dilemmatic ideas is almost required to appreciate the courage "Wild Things" has in crossing the line between the innocent candor of childhood and the ambiguous reality of leaving such childhood.
In spite of the ambiguity, "Wild Things" is inviting because of the charming performance and chemistry between Records and the Wild Things. Records perfects the disguised complexity in his cheeky but sincere smile in the rare moments when he smiles out of genuine relief and happiness. The Wild Things, now named and voiced by a prolific voice cast that include Chris Cooper and Forest Whitaker, are reported to have frightened children with their sulk and touchy emotions. But the heart-warming interaction between Max and the Wild Things sustains the film through its at times stagnant, albeit beautifully constructed, action. The mesmerizing, other-worldly, children-choir soundtrack by The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O has a lot to do with making those magical moments work.
Max’s idea of fun is a war game in which they would clobber up each other; designated bad guys are beaten by rock-hard dirt clots. Of course, the king can’t be the bad guy. So the Wild Things are divided up into teams, and eventually someone would take it too far and the party is broken up. In the end, Max leaves the party before it becomes more broken up. We’re not sure whether he knows that or he has just become hungry.
