By Elliot Boswell
We hold a strange and special place for the books of our childhood. We remember the stuttering steps we took from our parents reading to us to reading along with them to retreating under the covers with a flashlight until long after our bedtimes.
And as many of us age, I think, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the literal content of those books with the pleasures they gave us as children, of the ways they allowed us to unmoor our imaginations, even when they don't satisfy our older selves. When I read "The Lorax" now, for example, the six-year-old Elliot rejoices for every time the 21-year-old Elliot cringes. It is the reason I predict that few people of my generation will be able to write any sort of meaningful criticism about the "Harry Potter" series: We grew up alongside Harry, and it would betray something very deep within us to renounce him.
"Where the Wild Things Are" is one of these books, albeit not solely for people my age. First published in 1963 by Maurice Sendak, "WTWTA" falls into the long tradition of escapist fantasies from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Narnia" to "Pan's Labyrinth," and is now the subject of a full-length film of the same name, released in theaters two weeks ago.
It may be embarrassingly redundant to even offer a synopsis, but a quick and dirty one would read as follows: Our protagonist, Max, fights with his mother over dinner, runs away, sails a boat to an island, meets the Wild Things (of which there are seven, in various sizes and zoomorphic resemblances), causes an extended "wild rumpus," has an extended falling out with the Wild Things, and sails home to find his mother and dinner waiting up for him.
At this point, it's fair to wonder exactly how, and if, all this can account for a compelling two-hour movie; after all, the book consists of only a handful of sentences, where most page-to-screen adaptations suffer from an overload of language. Yet thanks to writer/director Spike Jonze (it was co-written with novelist Dave Eggers) and newcomer Max Records, "WTWTA" works, astonishingly well at times, and the result is one of the most challenging, beautiful and resonant films of the year.
Jonze, better known as the director of 1999's "Being John Malkovich" and 2002's "Adaptation," treats Sendak's canonical tale with all the reverence it deserves, yet is unafraid to impose his own aesthetic vision upon it, taking things Sendak only hints at and placing them center stage. In most instances, this involves the Wild Things themselves, and the island they inhabit, which is expanded to include all sorts of topography I don't remember from the book.
Jonze shoots his subjects intimately - the opening scene is a first-person sequence of Max tumbling head-over-heels down a flight of stairs - often to the point of resembling a grainy home video. The landscapes alternate between rocky crags to Tatooine-like stretches of sand dunes to dense, evergreen forests, and Jonze teases the respective richness out of each of these, giving us one visual feast after another.
Records, on the other hand, is very much a passive voyager, wide-eyed, rambunctious, but unfailingly sweet, and plays Max (the character) with the sort of open-armed acceptance that such an adventure must surely evoke in a child.
But it is with the Wild Things that Max sails headlong into a world which threatens his innocence, and the point where the movie takes a turn into a briar patch of tangled adult-ish emotions. Led by Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), the Wild Things are a moody, fickle, occasionally funny bunch who resemble nothing if not a Support Group for Purposeless Adults, yet who flock to the roughly 10-year-old Max as their emotional lodestar.
The relationship between these two camps is where "WTWTA" derives a good deal of its drama, and it's also where it lends itself most baldly to interpretation, especially Freudian ones. To do so, and to paraphrase the novelist David Foster Wallace, seems to be the equivalent of grinding a rose through a spectrometer to figure out why it smells so good. I'd rather refrain.
I walked out of this film deeply ill at ease, with the vague feeling of concrete lining my stomach. I hadn't expected to feel so confronted by a "kid's movie," or for it to hit so close to home, which is in no small part my own fault for having such fixed expectations in the first place. Why were the Wild Things so miserable, adrift in an existential fog? Did Max help to save them, if they were salvageable at all? Is this supposed to be a commentary on the world of grown-ups? What kind of a children's movie is this anyway?
Surprisingly, I found, if not answers, then some relief in the form of my twelve-year-old brother, who had gone to see it with me. I asked him how he liked it, and he told me that, yes, he thought it was good. As for me? Depressing, I told him. I feel confused. Oh yeah, he responded - I guess it was kind of sad.
I realized then that he had seen an entirely different movie than I had, that he hadn't picked up on the unexplained past between Carol and his possible one-time crush K.W., for one, or on the half-angry/half-let-down looks which passed between them. Or the vague, listless angst that intruded on everything the Wild Things did. "WTWTA" is like a cinematic Rorschach blot: It's a kid movie for kids, an adolescent movie for adolescents and an adult movie for adults.
If there is one thing that I think should be taken away from the film, it is, appropriately, the final shot. Max returns to his home and dinner and mother, waiting lovingly and anxiously up for him. She hugs him, and he begins to eat. Across the table from him, her greatest fear assuaged, she dozes off. Here, in the real world, with the people who really care about him, is where Max belongs.
