Where the Wild Things Are is a Unique Visit to a Children’s Classic That Defies Classification.

Posted by ScuzzBuster

October 18, 2009

Over the last couple of years, the soap opera that lead to the final release of Where the Wild Things Are has caused a lot of people like me, who love film, to instinctually take the side of Spike Jonze and bemoan the evil Warner Bros. studio for keeping his vision down. Maybe I’m not quite as anti-studio as some, but I did have to ask in the middle of the sordid, probably over-inflated stories that what the heck Warner thought they were going to get when they hired Jonze? If they didn’t want his vision of the material, why hire him? Well, assuming there was some truth to the alleged “war” between Warner and Jonze, I don’t think I could take either side very well after seeing it.

First, I have all sorts of forgiveness for Jonze involvement with the Jackass phenomenon because he’s been behind some great subversively cool entertainment. I still hold Being John Malkovich as one of the most incredible films that I’ve ever seen that probably never should have been made. I liked Adaptation a lot, too. Jonze was just the right sort of twisted to bring those two Charlie Kaufmann visions in to the light of day, or at least to the darkness of the cinema.

That being said, I have no idea how much what I saw today differed from what turned the Warner Executives hair white with fear a couple of years ago, but I can tell you exactly what I would have thought sitting through my first screening of this if I were responsible for the X Million dollars hanging on it. The thing going through my head would be “Oh, crap! I’m gonna lose my job!”

I’m sitting here not sure if I’ve been bowled over by a great film or whether I’m in a state of total confusion about it. In the intense work put in to making a film for kids and adults, Spike has quite possibly made a film for nobody. I was thinking this before the first of the half dozen walk outs that occurred in the screening I attended. Half a dozen walkouts is significant for any film, but in this case the theater that wasn’t even ¼ full to begin with. This could be a serious word of mouth concern for week two of release.

I think you may be hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t count the short book as one of the most beloved of their early childhood. There is a very thin stretch of time in a child’s life where it just speaks to you, and it did me, too. It’s one of those books that once you have kids, you immediately think you have to get for them as well. However, I found myself on Wikipedia recently having to ask the question of what the hell this brief few pages of iconic art was about. I haven’t dug through either of my kid’s rooms to find either of the two copies I know have to be in my house currently, but I think the most appropriate description of the movie comes in a brief quote from the Wikipedia entry about the book: “Francis Spufford suggests that the book is “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger.” From my recollection, that’s probably a stretch for the book itself, but it’s definitely a strong current flowing through the film.

There’s a brief setup with young Max and the balance between him wanting the attention of his older sister as well as the approval and attention of his struggling single mother, played by Catherine Keener. While the exposition sets up a key parallel between Max’s home life and the relationship he develops with the “Wild Things” it’s almost inconsequential to the messages that I pulled from the film personally.

For those that never visited this story as a child, it’s basically about a young boy named Max that takes a magic sailboat ride away from reality where the becomes king of a the “Wild Things,” on an island of big, butt-ugly monsters. The movie ends up being a simplistic but clever examination of the dynamics of interpersonal relationships through the eyes of a kid. The overriding theme I took away was how important it is to come to the understanding that you can’t please everybody. It’s actually important to come to the realization that everyone being happy and content is impossible because we’re individuals. When one person’s happiness conflicts with someone else’s, the paradox presents itself. It’s the life long struggle every human has balancing needs and desires and happiness vs contentment. The approach that this film takes towards that theme is brilliant in it’s simplicity. In this sense, it worked perfectly for me. This is what the art of filmmaking is about. That’s what spoke to me about Where the Wild Things Are. I don’t know what it was that spoke to anyone else in the theater, and in particular the people that began the periodic walkouts starting about ¾ of the way through.

Now as “good” as I think this movie is at face value, there is still a problem. I found the entire affair dreadfully depressing. This film in many ways is completely devoid of joy and I got no feeling that this was the intention when it was being made. While the look of the film is incredible, it’s also very drab. The bleak visual style starts to wear thin when combined with the continual downers that happen at almost every turn throughout the story. I started to feel that there is probably some decent reasoning behind someone who paid their ticket price not really wanting to sit through another scene. By the time the final moments of the film happen, which is very obviously supposed to be the emotional reward, I found myself just bleakly down in a major way. This dismal emotional slide really starts about midway through the film and continues all the way up until the credits.

Maybe this was the intention of Spike Jonze when he put his final stamp on the last cut of the film, but there was just something about the entire affair that made me walk out feeling worse than when I walked in, and it was an uncomfortable worse.

I can’t recommend this film to anyone, to be quite honest. I think there are going to be those that see it and feel that is a brilliant piece of filmmaking and an incredible treatment of a beloved children’s book. There are also going to be those that see this and get nothing more than eye full of a mutedly designed pieces of relatively dull, narrowly appealing artistic ego trips. In this case, both those assessments would be quite fair. Ultimately, the film does have a lot of merit and a handful of incredible voice performances, most notably James Gandolfini who delivers Oscar-worthy work here as if the Academy ever did justice to voice over work. But it’s still all overshadowed by the style of the work itself.

At some point over the next few weeks I’ll probably decide whether this ends up on my 10 best list for the year, on my list of 10 most disappointing. Just a few hours out of my viewing today, it could honestly end up on either of those lists for me with valid justification.