The Red Circle

By Tom Nix // 10.21.09

It’s a very tough task to critically review a movie as purposely abstract as Where the Wild Things Are. It’s not really a “kid’s movie,” although it appeals to children. It’s not really an “adult” movie, although you’d need to be one to fully appreciate what the movie has to tell you.

Telling is a bad verb to use when describing this film. The movie is an exploration of the precarious moments between owning the world when you’re a child and owing the world when you’re not. And it’s one hell of a story. It’s just given to you in a series of images, emotions, and sounds that don’t so much tell you a story as demand that you piece a story out of all of these parts. How much you identify with Max (or the idea of childhood itself) will reveal how much this film will speak to you.

Max is a troubled kid from a loving, but broken home. He has a single mother who is troubled with the possibility of being out of work, and a sister who is just old enough to be more annoyed with Max’s fantasy world than involved with it. After violently lashing out at his mother after a day full of defeat and rushing emotions, he runs away from home and climbs in a boat to sail away to where the wild things are.

Spike Jonze takes the unbelievably short Maurice Sendak novel (it’s only ten sentences long!) and expands it, changes it, and warps it to his sensibilities. His adaptation is fast, loose, and impressionistic. Brave would also be a good word. Great would be another.

Max Records’ portrayal of Max isn’t subtextually groundbreaking, but it is one of the most honest performances by a child actor. There are far too many instances where a child actor seems to be completely unaware of how a child acts and reacts. Jonze makes sure that every emotion and decision made by Max is informed by the subtleties (and the aggressions) of being ten years old.

The Wild Things themselves are another fascination. In the original, they were a bunch of wild caricatures – faces without names. They were there strictly for Max to learn his lesson. And while the purpose hasn’t exactly changed, the process has been completely disembowled. Every wild thing has a deep personality. Maybe not complex, in some cases, but the film wisely uses each creature as a mirror on part of Max’s personality and his home life.

There is Carol (Voiced with nuance I didn’t know he had by James Gandolfini). Carol is an approximation of Max in the wild thing world. He is a man who wants to keep his family together, and gets angry and intense when he realizes he can’t. Carol’s best friend is the feathered Douglas (his conscience). There’s also the couple of Judith and Ira are his insecurities and his loyalty. The rogue K.W. who has left to live on a different part of the island is his rebellion against the family that seems to make no sense. The small, goat-like Alexander is his guilt and self-derision. These characters are developed with precision, and their interaction tells a lot about the story as a whole In fact, paying attention during the very brief introduction before the Island Adventure will pay off in dividends – there are a lot of parallels, and all of them unspoken.

It’s odd to say that almost all of this is irrelevant. The movie, at its purest is a true vision of childhood. It’s all the feelings and physicality that goes along with it. Yes, there is a story to be told, and you will have to earn it. But, as a piece of visual art, Where The Wild Things Are is much more concerned with telling you your own story through your own eyes. The previous five-hundred words are mostly setup to tell you this. Spike Jonze has created a hymn to the imagination that only exists when you are nine years old. When that stick you’re holding IS a lightsaber. When that treestump IS a goblin warrior. When flying to the moon is a perfectly valid alternative to doing homework.

And the effectiveness of this method is entirely based on the individual watching it. Those looking for a visual feast will get it. But those looking for a plot with all the tried-and-true character and tone beats may find themselves a little befuddled. Those who are experiencing in this film exactly what Max is experiencing with the wild things will probably be transcended.

The true beauty of watching this film comes from its lack of concern over telling you how to watch it. You’ll just have to let your own experiences and your own judgments and predilections feel out the story for you. Max does some truly heinous things when viewed through objective eyes – but kids do this! To a child, war is not about hurting the other side. War is about the act of throwing dirt and snow. It ends with that. To a kid, asking your mom to hide in your fortress is the only way to make sense of a situation. Your willingness to accept that or believe in that will greatly impact your enjoyment of the film.

There’s good reason some of the critics out there have given this film a perfect score. It speaks to them on a very primitive level – it shows them themselves in way that they haven’t seen since they were a young person. There is a reason that many critics have disliked the film – the wild things are sad! They need assistance! This is implausible! The story as a narrative is far outweighed in importance as the story as the message.

It’s a little unfortunate that a lot of the viewing audience that will see this film will be around Max’s age in real life. While there will be a lot for them to enjoy – the scenes of the wild things playing with Max had the kids next to me glassy eyed and beaming – the movie will be a little lost on them.

The film is surely ABOUT being a child – but you will had to have lived through it to get the most resonance out of it. The film is aimed at the late twenties and thirty-year olds who have sufficiently been outside the pre-teen mindset for sometime, but still struggle with keeping it locked away in service of adulthood responsibilities. But, I think it’s the 40 year olds, with kids exactly Max’s age or a little older, that will be the most captivated by this film. Growing up in the 70’s, these people will identify with Max on a personal level as well as vicariously through their own children. Experiencing what is most of your life, funneled through the impeccable imagination of one of cinema’s greatest verite-fantasy auteurs, should be a filmic experience that will outmatch most other “kid’s movies” that have come out in the past decades.

Most importantly, it’s not Spike Jonze’s, Maurice Sendak’s or Dave Egger’s opinion of what a child is that drives this film straight into the souls of the faithful. It is your perception of your childhood elf that will either elevate or defeat some of the best filmmaking of the year. For me, a person that doesn’t want to admit how much like Max he really is, this film is something uniquely special. It’s something that is destined to be a classic of the genre. Not because it adds something more to the Child Movie category of filmmaking. Its because it defines the reality of being a kid through the lens of a film camera.

9.4 out of 10

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