Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

Based on the popular and celebrated children’s book of the same title written in 1963 by Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are has a lot to live up to. The story follows a young boy named Max who after getting in an argument with his mother is sent to bed and in the process runs away to an imaginary land where he is king of the monsters. After he gets homesick, he returns home to his mother. The story is simple, and not what you’d expect to be the content of a nearly two hour film. Director Spike Jonze however, manages to take this story, and while keeping the spirit if the source material intact, adds a much more mature setting to both the real world and the imaginary one where Max seeks refuge.

The film begins with Max in his iconic wolf pajamas playing a rough wrestling game with the family dog. Afterwards we are shown him playing outside by himself. Max doesn’t seem to have many (if any) friends and his older sister is growing older and more distant from him. Max has a lot of bottled up aggression that he takes out on his sister’s room and later his mother (Catherine Keener) when her boyfriend comes over to dinner. The boyfriend is played by Mark Ruffalo briefly (if you blink you may miss him). His fight with his mother gets too rough and he bites her; the immediate guilt and fear prompts him to run away and he ends up sailing to the imaginary island where the wild things are. Max right from the beginning is given more of a reason to be angry and seeking attention than his literary counterpart.

Max Records does an incredible job capturing that fear and desire to be loved and comforted that a child may have. He likes to play games and roughhouse, but often these games lead to someone getting hurt as he often experiences in the film. But even more than Max himself, the monsters inhabiting the island seem to have been expanded upon in terms of character depth. Each monster has his or her own emotional issues to sort out. They are all depressed, insecure, and miserable wanting nothing more than for some mysterious stranger to arrive and make them all happy. As their king, Max promises to do this for them, but both he and they soon find that one person can’t make everybody happy. Their leader is Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) who is Max’s favorite monster and also the most unbalanced. Like Max, he has his own aggression problems and often ends up hurting the people he loves with his mood swings and anxiety. I am aware that this last sentence described a character that is about 12 feet tall and furry.

Despite that fact that the book is a children’s story, make no mistake that this isn’t quite what one would consider a typical children’s film. I would argue that it is not so much a movie for children as it is a movie about children. The tone it sets is instantly relatable to anyone who has ever come close to having what could be considered a lonely childhood. It’s something that nearly every kid feels at one point or another, especially if they are the youngest or from a broken home. The film is dark and often as moody as the characters, but there is no denying the beauty of the world that has been adapted to the screen. It’s an imperfect world whether it is imaginary or real and this is executed very carefully by Spike Jonze. The first part of the film is shot almost like a documentary, and that same realism transfers over to the imaginary one that Max escapes to, albeit with more music and fantastic settings. The island contains cliffs, a dense forest, and even a desert where Carol explains that is the dead part of the island and expresses his fears about how everything will one day turn to dust.

The creatures themselves are quite impressive as a mix of CG and giant suits. The faces are usually the only part that’s animated and for the other parts, I honestly couldn’t tell. These things look as real as they can look with today’s technology. The only real problem that I have with this film is the question of who this is targeted to. In a time where the majority of the competition are other children’s films like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Monsters vs. Aliens, it’s difficult to see where a film like Where the Wild Things Are fits in. That being said, it is still a powerful film that should be seen by children and adults alike.