In the interest of full disclosure, before I start this review I have to admit that I was never really all that in love with Maurice Sendak's seminal 1963 children's book Where the Wild Things Are.
In retrospect, this seems a little strange. A story about a weirdo little kid with an overactive imagination, disenchanted with his day-to-day existence and yearning to sail off and romp around an island with a bunch of monsters should feel like autobiography. But for whatever reason the book never really grabbed hold of my imagination the way it did some kids. I remember liking the basic idea and thinking the pictures were pretty cool, but that was about it.
Right before the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film adaptation came out a couple weeks ago, I went to a Borders and thumbed through a copy of Sendak's original to see if the adult-me could figure out why the book fell with such a thud on the kid-me so many years ago. It surprised me how clearly I remembered the pictures, but it didn't surprise me how narratively slight the actual book is. For a budding writer like myself (I was putting together my own little text-heavy picture books when I was six), the cool pictures and those ten lines of prose just didn't cut it.
The book essentially goes like this: little Max gets in trouble, little Max gets sent to bed without dinner, little Max runs off to the land of the Wild Things, little Max and the Wild Things swing from some trees, little Max gets bored, little Max goes home. The most interesting stuff was completely left out. What exactly happens when Max and the Wild Things start running through the woods? Do they kill and eat things? Do the Wild Things ever threaten to turn on him? What?
The Neverending Story (1984) was (and is) one of my favorite movies. Thematically, it's almost exactly the same as Where the Wild Things Are. I wore out my VHS copy with repeated viewings over the years, but I don't remember cracking open my Wild Things book more than once or twice. The difference was, of course, that in Wild Things nothing really happens. In The Neverending Story a whole mess of shit happens. I couldn't have put it this way at the time, but there are stakes.
When I went to see the movie, I was vaguely curious and not really expecting to have a strong opinion either way. I didn't figure I'd love it or hate it. I just wanted to see what they came up with. And, to be honest, my first impression was that I was underwhelmed. Needless to say the film looked amazing, and it's clear from the first five minutes that little Max Records is a real find. But the story still felt pretty thin to me.
Then I went to sleep that night and dreamed about it. And when I went to sleep the next night I dreamed about it again. Somehow the movie stuck with me in a way the book never did.
I don't have a lot critically to say about this film, because my reaction was largely impressionistic. Yeah, Jonze and Eggers provided a genuine narrative framework, not only to Max's real world (he's the youngest child of a divorced single mom, and he desperately wants his sullen teenage sister's approval) but to the imaginary world he escapes to. The conflicts (completely absent from the book) that erupt between Max and the Wild Things deftly mirror the conflicts going on back home. Overly clever and on the nose, sure, but to harp on that seems to me to miss the point.
What makes the movie work is the way in which Eggers and Jonze slyly nudge the audience back into a child's-eye-view of reality. The Wild Things themselves -- surly Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), distant KW (Lauren Ambrose), morose Ira (Forrest Whitaker) and his irate girlfriend Judith (Catherine O'Hara), Carol's best friend Douglas (Chris Cooper) and perpetually picked-on Alexander (Paul Dano) -- all think and behave with the logic of children. They're neurotic, affectionate, imaginative, jealous, and occasionally temperamental.
Max, of course, fits right in. He bonds immediately with Carol (I have to admit that hearing Tony Soprano coming out of the creature's mouth was pretty distracting at first) and KW, the two of whom are eye-rollingly obvious reflections of Max and his distant sister. Carol is jealous because KW keeps wandering off to hang out with a couple mysterious friends on the other side of the island (this leads to one of the movie's funnier and more bizarre reveals). By trying to be friends with both, Max inadvertently exacerbates the problem. Meanwhile Judith and Ira are jealous because Max -- their newly elected king -- seems to favor Carol and Douglas over them. His solution, of course, is to propose a dirt-clod fight. "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys." You can guess where that leads.
I can't quite articulate what it is Jonze and Eggers -- along with their actors -- do to make this feel like a genuine reflection of childhood rather than an adult's feeble attempt to mimic childhood. It's a pretty diaphanous thing they pull off, hard to wrap one's head around in any sort of intellectual way. Somehow they manage to tap that well and slop the memories out. Whatever it is they do and however they do it, it works.
At the end of the day, I wouldn't call this a brilliant movie or any sort of masterpiece. I still think it's pretty slight. The themes, beautifully and lovingly presented as they are, are pretty small and terribly obvious. To my mind the film still lacks the richness, emotional resonance, and fullness of imagination that The Neverending Story had in spades.
Of course, that might only be because I saw that movie when I was an actual child, rather than a guy in his 30s trying to remember what childhood was like. If I had seen this movie as a kid, I don't know if I would have felt any more strongly about it than I did the book. Maybe. Maybe not. Who's to say?
But as an adult who feels more and more disconnected from that hyperimaginative child I used to be with every inch that my gut expands and my hairline recedes, Where the Wild Things Are touched a soft spot on my heart I didn't expect.
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