where the wild things are - a review of the film

Most of us who have read Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak remember its haunting loneliness, its unadulterated childlike imagination, and its underlying anger verging on violence.  Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is not a childrens’ film, rather a film about the exquisite loneliness and angry defiance of childhood.  The aching that each of us has felt for some direction, some sense of belonging to something, to someone, the deep need for an absent or distracted parent’s affection. 

Shot mostly on handheld cameras, Jonze creates a vision of this classic, dark story straight from the eyes of a child trying to find his way in the world. The look of the film creates an aura of danger, the feeling that Max could get hurt, or even die, at any time.  We worry about and for him, yet simultaneously revel in his ability to dive headfirst into his dream world with the Wild Things where they are his subjects and he their King. 

The film opens with a shot of Max, perfectly played by Max Records, on a rampage through the house, wearing his signature wolf pajamas, chasing, terrifying, even abusing the family dog.  Screaming, wrestling, and growling, as the Max Wolf tears down the stairs after the poor pooch, his anger and restlessness as a character is palpable if not frightening.

With co-writer Dave Eggers, Jonze expertly expanded the back story in the adaptation, letting us in on little details of Max’s inner life and his relationship with his family.   We see Max as a lonely, angry kid with a vibrant imagination. Throughout the film, he frequently creates forts out of snow and ice, blankets and sheets, and eventually a pile of smelly, furry monsters, where he is enclosed, alone, and safe, yet once inside, yearns for the company and attention of others.  He starts a fight with his older sister and her friends, only to rush to her room and smash a gift he made her after she humiliates him in front of her friends.  His desperate need for his mother is made more and more apparent as he acts out by jumping on the dinner table while she has a date over, screaming “Feed Me Woman!  I will EAT YOU UP!”  Before biting her and running out the door and into his imagination.  People as food is a recurring theme throughout the book and the film, and is made ever more real when Max meets the Wild Things.   

The sense of danger is constantly present, but truly illustrates not only Max’s need to express his anger and frustration at the world but the alienation he feels trying to find his place in it.   He discovers himself in a whole new world, full of Wild Things, of freedom, of liberation, yet he is always slightly on edge.  Carol, KW and the rest of the gang are a ragtag bunch of Wild Things, voiced by actors to match such as Lauren Ambrose and Catherine O’Hara, and brought to life on screen as dazzling creations by The Jim Henson Company.  The combination of the humanity of these Wild Things, these seeming adults who are hungry and dirty and big and out of sync, with the animalistic urges of Max letting himself go totally makes the world he creates seem as if it could exist here on Earth, just out of sight over the horizon somewhere, waiting for us to come find it.

Max’s time in the place Where the Wild Things Are is short, but while there, he builds a family where he is the center.  He gets a little something he needs from each of the Wild Things, a friend.  And is able especially to fulfill his own need to become a Wild Thing himself and be with those who understand him.  But the place Where the Wild Things Are is not a place one goes to live forever, and Max ultimately misses his other life and heartbreakingly decides to go back to his real family, and his real place as a kid in the world. Much like The Labyrinth and The Wizard of Oz before it, Where the Wild Things Are really exists to show us something about ourselves:  that there truly is no place like home.