Philadelphia Weekly

What stays with you is the sadness. There’s an almost unbearable undertow of melancholy in director Spike Jonze’s awkward, arty adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, that is entirely unexpected.

As you’ve probably heard by now, this ain’t your average cookie-cutter kid’s flick, and I can already picture the furious soccer moms demanding refunds for their traumatized offspring in multiplex lobbies across the land. 


Shot three years ago, the movie has been plagued by rumors of post-production woes and freaked-out studio executives. The suits had every right to be worried, as Jonze’s film is both magical and strange. It’s an extraordinarily subjective experience, burrowing so deeply into its child hero’s perspective that the movie works something like a Rorschach test for viewers. Some are left completely cold, others in tears. Count me in the latter camp.


Drawing out Sendak’s nine sentences to feature length, Jonze and his co-
screenwriter Dave Eggers begin by sketching the unhappy world of young Max (Max Records) with admirable swiftness and clarity. In just a handful of choice moments we put together that Dad is nowhere to be found and Mom (Catherine Keener) is completely overwhelmed. His aloof big sister’s friends tend to take rough-housing a bit too far, and nobody seems to display the appropriate level of respect or admiration for Max’s awesome snow fort. He’s a lonely, angry child, and after throwing a temper tantrum to try and disrupt his Mom’s date with Mark Ruffalo, Max retreats into his imagination.


After a perilous sea voyage, he discovers a vast forest populated by giant muppets with wide eyes and runny noses. Designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop with facials expressions augmented by seamless computer animation, these Wild Things are towering furry, and often very funny beasts. Max, still wearing his wolf pajamas, quite accidentally becomes their king, spinning tall tales of viking slaughters and “a loneliness shield” that will make all their sadness go away.


Obviously each creature represents an aspect of Max’s home life, but Jonze and Eggers wisely don’t dwell on the psycho-analysis, and instead let the animals speak for themselves. Their simple, often silly talk manages to encompass the gamut of childhood anxieties, with petty jealousies and temper tantrums always circling back around to a gnawing fear of abandonment that haunts the movie’s core. 


James Gandolfini lends his voice to Carol, the largest and neediest of the bunch, who suffers from some pretty severe mood swings. It’s a bravura performance, almost like a compendium of Tony Soprano’s most babyish hissy fits. Lauren Ambrose voices the elusive KW with a droll valley girl sneer, and Chris Cooper does some bone-dry deadpan as a hawk-like fellow named Douglas.


The film’s early scenes are riffed on and replayed in this fantastical setting. There are wild rumpuses, dirt-clod fights aplenty, and another awesome fort. But the catch this time around is that King Max also has to be the parent, too. The idyll is his coming of age—he’s learning that actions have consequences. Even in this fantasy world, when you break stuff, it stays broken.


Where the Wild Things Are has a roughness and texture that’s foreign to most family films. Shot with handheld cameras in rugged, outdoor locations, there’s nothing glossy about it at all. These big furry beasts are about as far as you can get from smooth CGI creations, and there’s a marvelously unpolished clumsiness to their movements. Jonze and his cinematographer, Lance Acord, favor low angles, better to lock us into Max’s perspective, always looking up at this strange new world.


It’s not a perfect film, but I doubt a movie so raw and deeply felt ever could be. Even if the energy flags at times, Jonze has tapped into something almost primal here. Without ever coming out and overstating it, Where the Wild Things Are taps such a rich vein of divorced-kid, 
absent-daddy issues, Steven Spielberg will be jealous. ■