‘Where The Wild Things Are’ review
Spike Jonze captures the Wild Things that exist within us all.
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It’s not easy being a kid, especially if you’re Max. Your mum’s frog-eyed boyfriend lounges around like he owns the place, smelling of red wine and pâté. Your sister acts like she doesn’t know you - like the world you created together is nothing but a silly game. And your teacher has just informed you that one day soon the sun will die, and all the people and animals and stuff inside your house will wither away too, until there’s nothing left but dust. So now you have to keep everyone together because otherwise, well, everything will just fall apart.
It’s confusing, frustrating and downright dark.
But the worst thing about being a kid is the bit where you have to grow up. When that moment comes, when all the wild emotions that once bewildered you suddenly turn numb, everything that came before it will slowly slip away. And the urge to run because you’re angry or throw dirt because you’re sad will fade seamlessly into an anesthetised haze. Bit by bit, everyone forgets what it’s like to be a kid.
Everyone, that is, except Spike Jonze.
In a wild rumpus of cathartic chaos, Jonze has turned Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic into a celebration of boyhood and bedlam. It took 338 words and 35 illustrated pages for Where The Wild Things Are to capture the imagination of a generation at bedtime. And it’s taken all the guileless intuition Jonze could muster to reconnect adults with the story and their former selves.
But he didn’t do it alone. With Dave Eggers as a sparring writing partner, and Karen O channeling her inner child into the soundtrack, Jonze has nurtured Sendak’s simple sensibility into a sophisticated metaphor for the wild things inside us that are impossible to tame. Max is a kid of the here and now - another lost and lonely bystander of divorce who’s grappling with change. And whether he’s destroying his sister’s room in a fit of rage or doing the robot dance to wash away the sadness behind his mother’s eyes, we’re right there with him, feeling all that anger and frustration that’s so difficult to name.
But in the land of the Wild Things, emotions take on a tangible form. Anger, sadness, loneliness and guilt are all dirty reckless monsters, who fly impulsively from togetherness to chaos to something darker just beyond. Through them, Max finds a voice for the things that bubble up inside:
“You know what it feels like when all your teeth are falling out really slowly and you don't realise and then you notice that, well, they're really far apart?“ says the wildest of the Wild Things, Carol (James Gandolfini). “And then one day... you don't have any teeth anymore? Well it was like that.”
With the delicate touch of a kid who says it like it is, Jonze and Eggers have captured the feelings that elude us all. The nuances that distance us from the ones we love - that make families shout about things that don’t matter, and refuse to talk about the stuff that does. The way we try to keep everything together by pushing everyone apart. And how the entire world can be lifted with a single word:
“I'll eat you up, I love you so,” says KW, voicing the feelings that pass by unsaid between Max and his mother in the closing scene. What was wild on paper has depth and heart on film.
But where Sendak’s Wild Things were conjured by a single mind, the ones rampaging through Spike’s world didn’t just come from some place deep inside. They’re as elusive and human as a Dave Eggers novel; as raucous and frenetic as a Karen O song; and they bite and fight and fly off the wall with the impulse and energy of Video Days or Fully Flared. Because if Where The Wild Things Are lends credence to the theory that Spike Jonze is in fact a skinny kid in director’s clothes, it’s also proof that great things can happen when like minds collide.
If you fail to connect, it's far too long since your teeth felt loose.
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‘Where The Wild Things Are’ review (text) by Andrea Kurland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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