Ryan McNeil
Some kids don’t have it so easy. They find themselves feeling left out for reasons beyond their control, and there’s only so much time they can be their own best friend. Some of these kids are content to be quiet introverts, others are wild things just waiting to roar.
The book that this movie is based on is precisely ten sentences long, thus it feels overindulgent to waste too many words on plot. If you are one of the sad children who were never read the story at bedtime, it goes like so…
There’s a badly behaved child named Max (Max Records). One night he dresses up in his favorite wolf costume and acts out even worse than normal. His mother (Catherine Keener) loses her temper when Max bites her. When she scolds him even more Max runs away to a nearby shoreline. There he climbs into an abandoned sailboat and sets sail, eventually reaching an island. And as the title tells us, this island is where the wild things are.
In the book, the island where the wild things are exists only in Max’s imagination. So perhaps it’s fitting, that when time came to turn the book into a feature film, director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers were forced to push their imagination further than most. It’s one thing to take a book the length of an iPod manual and turn it into a film – it’s something else entirely to take a beloved story and try to expand it into something that hopes to be equally beloved. Risky, is precisely what it is.
Happily, Eggers and Jonze come through. They begin by trying to help us better understand Max. He might indeed be a brat, but steps are taken to actually explain his bratishness…even to make us sympathize. One has to wonder how difficult children become difficult. Modern science has started chalking it up to a certain chemical imbalance, but when I was a kid it wasn’t so scientific. Eggers understands that. Like his inspiration on the page, this Max is a holy terror…but he’s also lonely, isolated, and misguided. There is no amount of Riddlin in the world that would do as much for Max as a walk in the park with his big sister.
What Eggers does for Max, Jonze does for The Wild Things. Indeed they take time to roll their terrible eyes, and gnash their terrible teeth. These wild things however, also like to break things, to cause a rumpus, and to build better things than those which they’ve broken.
Sound familiar?
Indeed, the heart and soul of this film is the way the wild things so desperately want from Max, that which Max in turn wants from his family.
While it felt like the wild things threw one temper tantrum too many, they have enough heart, warmth and whimsy to make Jim Henson smile down from whatever cloud he’s sitting upon. Spike Jonze understand what it’s like to be picked last at recess, and he infuses that adolescent loneliness into every last inch of this movie.
Cant wait to see this one, sounds amazing. Ive read some reviews saying its very thin when it comes to story…but I got a feeling the movie will please from a visual and emotional angle.
Thanks for the review!
The more good reviews I see for this, the more it annoys me that I know that I'll be as late to the party on this as I was with Up… alas is the life of a poor college student.
I loved the way the wild things looked, though I found KW's appearance to be a little distracting since they really seemed to go out of their way to make her look like her voice actress, Lauren Ambrose.
@ Francisco… Hard to fault a story for being thin when it's based on such short source material. Of course, the inverse is a movie like BENJAMIN BUTTON that took a short story and dragged it on for three hours…so maybe brevity isn't so bad!
@ Univarn… What goes around, comes around. I'm sure down the line my trips to a cinema will slow, and I'll be the one wishing I could see movies YOU are writing about.
@ Norma… Totally agree! I'm sure there was a bit of CGI going on, but the grounded, organic look of it all made it easier to suspend disbelief.