Where the Wild Things Are - Spike Jonze

Director Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are is subdued and beautiful, intelligent about the emotions of a boy from a broken home but clear and direct in expressing them. It features sublime cinematography by Lance Acord and production design by K.K. Barrett, who create a visual landscape that eschews the usual candy-colored aesthetic of kids’ movies in favor of a dreamier, more sophisticated palette of sand and amber tones. My memory of the Sendak classic is limited, so I can only discuss whether the film does justice to itself. It does. It’s made by mature filmmakers who value mood over sensory stimulation.

Early scenes briefly but vividly introduce us to Max (Max Records, in a natural and affecting performance), an eight-year-old child of divorced parents whose father is absent, sister is distant, and mother is frazzled. At school, he’s stricken with anxiety after his teacher explains that the sun will eventually die and engulf the planets. The human race will be long dead by then, he explains, but unsurprisingly that doesn’t allay Max’s fears. Learning about the death of the sun makes literal the dread he already feels about his world, which has been upended by his parents’ separation.

What Jonze and Records do in these establishing scenes is show how very big the small events of Max’s life feel to him, and the emotions ring true and leave lasting impressions. The look on his face upon having his makeshift igloo crushed by his older sister’s friends — while he’s still in it, which would be frightening to me now, let alone when I was eight — is devastating, as is his look of regret upon smashing a frame he made for her as retaliation for her inaction. Looking down at the broken wood pieces, we can feel the sadness of their relationship, once fond, now alienated.

After an argument with his mother (Catherine Keener, in a brief but lived-in performance), Max runs away from home and finds a small boat that takes him across an ocean to a distant shore, where the wild things live. They’re an odd, offbeat group, like characters in a Wes Anderson movie but with a softer, more expressive touch. (Contrast these deeply emotional creatures with the smart-aleck animals from Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.) We find them in the midst of discord not unlike the one Max has run away from. Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), an imposing beast who is impulsive and playful in ways that reflect Max himself, is on a rampage, smashing the homes of his friends and neighbors. He is calmed when Max declares himself king and promises to repair the rifts between the wild things.

In that way, the remainder of his time with the creatures becomes a metaphoric working through of his emotions about his family. He and Carol want nothing but for the people they love to be together, secure, and happy. They try to put things right in ways that make sense in the imagination of a child, including the building of a giant fort, which as Max imagines will be a world unto itself, a place with only good feelings and no bad ones, only people you love and no one you don’t. It takes shape as a giant open sphere that soars into the sky, a unifying place of comfort where Max and the wild things huddle together for warmth. As a tangible manifestation of his most basic desires, the fort is visually poetic.

But things are not as simple as Max would like them to be. The wild things have minds of their own and don’t always agree. They don’t always behave how he wants them to behave. They don’t always feel how he wants them to feel. They have differences that even their king cannot reconcile. Carol is estranged from K.W. (Lauren Ambrose), who has left the group to spend time with a pair of owls named Bob and Terry. (How she communicates with the owls — if it’s communication at all — is a bizarre delight.) Soon Max wants time to himself too, and Carol reacts with the same betrayal that Max felt from his mother and sister.

The wild things are remarkable characters, with faces full of emotional detail and brought to life by voice actors who give soft-spoken performances that bring out the subtle wit and longing of Jonze and Dave Eggers’s screenplay. Ira and Judith are a married couple with opposing personalities — he’s placid and agreeable, she’s stubborn and suspicious — played by Forest Whitaker and Catherine O’Hara. Paul Dano plays Alexander, an oft-ignored goat, with loveable, sad-sack gentleness. Chris Cooper plays Douglas, a bird, and Michael Berry Jr. voices Bernard the Bull, who does not speak until the very end, which makes what he says all the more touching. It’s a rare thing in films with an all-star voice cast that we never think of the actors, only the characters.

Gandolfini seems an unlikely choice to play Carol, but is an inspired one. The erstwhile Tony Soprano makes Carol gruff and intimidating, but also expresses an open-hearted vulnerability to match Max’s. Carol has built a model made of sticks — recalling the frame Max made for his sister — that shows what he wishes his island looked like. Max too has invented an idealized world for himself, populated by wild animals whom he loves and who love him. But somewhere deep down Max realizes that things can never be perfect. Family is not found in the absence of problems, he learns, but in dealing with them.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: