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Reviews > Movie Reviews > Where the Wild…

Where the Wild Things Are Review
07 Dec 2009
Critics rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
Where the Wild Things Are

"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind... and another..."

Sendak’s words are so carefully chosen, and his images are so potent, he creates not one, but two worlds within a handful of pages. First there is the mundane domestic life of a rampaging six or seven year old child, and then the thrillingly boisterous, exotic and acquiescent land of his imagination – an island of wild and wonderful beasts where he rules the roost, at least until dinner-time.

The trick of the movie is to fill in the blanks without papering over the story’s infinitely suggestive wriggle room, the poetic crawl space that can transform a bedroom into a forest into a sea; a small boy into a king; and a temper tantrum into a jungle rumpus…

Spike Jonze?s direct and daring live action film gets a lot right. It’s physical: full of roughhousing and dirt clod fights, the kind that start fun and inevitably end in tears. It’s funny: Jonze has a knack for throwaway gags, like the wild thing that loses an arm and substitutes it with a stick. It’s also potentially ferocious: there’s a real fear that Max’s new best fiend Carol (a toothy id monstrosity voiced by James Gandolfini) will lose his self control and eat him up, he loves him so.

The opening ten to 15 minutes, in the “real” world, are beautifully judged, giving us the kind of acute (as opposed to cute) child’s eye view we used to get from Steven Spielberg. Max (freckle-faced Max Records) can pick at the toes of his mom’s tights until he has her attention, wear a wolf suit, and stomp snow all over his big sister’s bed, all without a hint of self-consciousness. And when he cries, his face burns up.

Max Records

The “where” – once we get there – doesn’t resemble a studio interior or a green screen simulation, it’s a forest with real trees growing in the ground, even if they’re pocked with CGI holes where the wild things have swiped them. Jonze?s regular DP, Lance Acord, shoots fantasy with the simplicity of a home movie, with occasional shakes and wobbles and beautiful accidents.

When Max declares himself king, the small boy becomes patriarch, but for all his big dreams he proceeds to make a royal mess of everything, as dads so often do.

Fair enough.

But the wild things themselves - each painstakingly modeled on Sendak's illustrations - are more problematic.

But the wild things themselves – each painstakingly modeled on Sendak’s illustrations – are more problematic. By design they’re neither fish nor fowl: they have fur and scales and wings and horns. They are also, quite evidently, actors in body suits. The movie’s release was delayed for a year while the effects guys devised animatronic facial movements for them, but even if you can’t see the joins, you can feel them… And hear them.

What does a wild thing sound like? Sendak only hints at it, but this is where Jonze and his cowriter, novelist Dave Eggers have devoted their energies, imagining a dysfunctional tribe of petulant overgrown children, rampaging through the woods without inhibition or restraint, who are also immature adults – voiced by Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, and Chris Cooper – bitching and bickering about the social pecking order. This must be what it’s like backstage at the Disneyland Parade. Disenchanting.

Max Records

My problem with these overgrown grouches is two-fold: (a) after a while they’re a drag to be around; and (b) if we interpret this island as a figment of Max’s imagination, then where did these folk come from? Are they his parents (we have seen no evidence of a dad)? His uncles and aunts? His teachers? Somehow they don’t seem like the kind of playmates Max would concoct for himself.

A bit like his near contemporary Wes Anderson in Fantasic Mr Fox, Jonze gives us a smart, poignant riff on a very short story, but even more than Anderson Jonze tilts the movie decisively towards an older audience and away from the book’s youngest fans.

It’s a curious film, and there are moments that stay with you, but in all honesty I wanted to love it and came out a little disappointed.

Where the Wild Things Are Reviews

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