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Max’s “hunt” reminded me of when my pomeranian does much the same thing to my cats. She isn’t trying to kill or even hurt the cats — it’s just play. So, too, with Max, who feels wildness in his soul, inchoate feelings of abandonment and rage he can only deal with by devolving. His mom is divorced and busy, his dad is never around, his older sister is growing away from him. There’s nothing much Max can do but growl and howl.

Hunter S. Thompson prefaced Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Samuel Johnson’s line “He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Johnson’s line could as well have led into Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, which has entranced kids and scandalized certain adults for generations. Spike Jonze’s film version may reverse the equation: adults may get more out of it than kids will, and indeed Jonze has spoken of it as more a film about childhood than a film for children. In the book, Max is sent to bed without supper, and imagines that his bedroom turns into a vast shaggy forest inhabited by “wild things” — massive creatures who at first want to eat him, until he convinces them to worship him as a king. In the movie, Max sees his mother (Catherine Keener) on the couch with her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo) and loses it — he “acts out,” biting his mom on the shoulder and taking off into the night, eventually finding a boat and floating off to the island of the wild things.

Where the Wild Things Are was shot (beautifully, by cinematographer Lance Acord) in various parts of Australia, and the locale makes about as much sense as a boy’s fecund, capricious fantasy of the perfect place — it has a forest, a desert, and a sea. The forest is usually dark, though when Max and the wild things run out to the cliffs, it’s perfect orange dusk. This is an anomaly, an idiosyncratic art film with a big budget, psychologically dense yet emotionally transparent. Max’s pain is reflected by the wild things, a morose and grumbling pack, including the big destroyer Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), who may stand in for Max’s Id.

Essentially, the movie is about Max’s journey from childish solipsism (“Woman, feed me!” he bellows at his mom on her date night) to an awareness of situations and feelings outside himself. Max’s new responsibilities as the “king” of the wild things — he has promised to banish sadness from their land — bring him to a greater understanding of what his mom deals with. The bickering couple Ira (Forest Whitaker) and Judith (Catherine O’Hara) may represent Max’s divorced parents, while the distant but warm KW (Lauren Ambrose) may be both a big-sister and mother figure. The narrative is free-form enough to be interpreted any number of ways, none of which will be right or wrong.

This is a strange (and moving) heffalump indeed, a future cult classic if ever there was one, and to believe in it you have to believe in the unfocused anger of a nine-year-old who doesn’t understand much of anything until others look to him for guidance. He learns, as it were, on the job, and he is imperfect. The movie, on the other hand, strikes me as perfect on every level. Some will find it amorphous and even boring — it’s not the usual CGI razzle-dazzle we’ve been led to expect from movies based on children’s literature, with the latest hot comedian playing to the rafters through pounds of latex.

At its best, it communicates the pain of being a boy who gets rid of that pain by making a beast out of himself, before learning to put childish — and wild — things behind him.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=18530&reviewer=416
originally posted: 10/19/09 08:17:49
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