Max screams; image courtesy of cherryhill.injersey.com
I saw Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are this past Saturday. At the Imax, dudes. With actual children, no less. And then I had a lovely dinner for four that two friends cooked. Austin is a town full of hospitable folk doing their part to drive the long-anticipated feature to the number one draw at the box office. Y’all come.
Now, I’ve been waiting for Jonze’s third feature, based on the classic Maurice Sendak children’s book, to come out for years (I guess on the heels of his video for Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights,” the duo have released We Were Once a Fairytale – thanks for the update, Annie). And while the $600 playsuit threatened to put a damper on the proceedings, dammit if I didn’t choke up every time I saw the trailer. In short, my expectations were susceptible to being dashed.
So I was pleasantly surprised that they pretty much weren’t. My only real complaint is that I actually think the script Jonze and Dave Eggers put together could have been less conventional. That said, the movie does a commendable job bridging a fantastical island of wild things from the protagonist Max’s imagination into some place at once real and unreal — the wild things are faithfully rendered from the book, yet have names like Carol and Alexander. It also does a good job capturing the loose pacing and the seemingly nonsensical ideas that come to life from creative processes. Carol, the leader of the wild things, builds a miniature world that contains all his friends and idealized notions of life with them in a manner at once so precise and makeshift that I couldn’t help but wonder if the diarama was Jonze’s tip of the hat to buddy Michel Gondry. Max orders the wild things to build a fortress that seems impossible to build, until it materializes before our eyes.
Oh, and I can’t believe I saw a big-budget mainstream motion picture where all of the studio logos were defaced by children’s doodlings.
There are startling moments of realism in Max’s fantasy world, as when a real raccoon appears in a wild thing’s belly named Richard or when another wild thing rescues a housecat. There’s also shocking moments of aural and physical violence, both in Max’s real and imagined worlds. A wild thing rips a limb off another, teenage boys dive into the igloo Max lovingly built out of snow in his front yard, Max tells his mother (played by the superlative Catherine Keener) a story about a vampire who loses his fangs while trying to bite through a castle’s walls. Nothing is more violent than our emotions, however, especially when they materialize as shouts of joy and squishy snot pools of angst.
Mother-son fighting; image courtesy of daemonsmovies.com
For Max, almost all of these emotions and flights of fancy are the result of his parents’ recent divorce, clearly Jonze’s attempt to process his childhood and his dissolved marriage to Sofia Coppola. Some people may really hate this narrative decision, which is no where addressed in the skeletal source material. I note that Sendak intentionally left the story elliptical and thus would be heartened to see multiple adaptations of this book from a variety of directors, each with their own sense of character motivation and plot. Also, as a product of a broken home who in all likelihood was sitting in a theater with other children and adults who dealt with divorce, I found a tremendous amount of catharsis in watching this lonely boy try — and sometimes fail — to work through his feelings about what once was but can never be again. Speaking for myself, I got through this by drawing murals of mermaids that talked to me, having eight imaginary sisters named Jessica, and running in my backyard alone pretending to be a fairy. So I felt for Max.
Thinking about kids, let me give it up for the crowd with whom I saw this movie. Possibly the only screening I’ve been to where the sound of babies crying actually added to the ambiance, I’m happy to report that the theater I saw this movie in was teeming with kids. And not all white, liberal, hipster kids whose parents like movies that do well in Brooklyn. “Regular” kids, some with bowl haircuts and homemade crowns and Nike running shoes. ”Normal” kids who seemed energized by the movie afterwards (as someone who was scared of monsters, I would not have been one of those kids). And most of them seemed to be pretty on-the-ball, problematizing some of the speculations that kids won’t “get” this movie. I’d gladly point out the boy behind us who instantly figured out that two squawking owls were telling a knock-knock joke.
And speaking of on-the-ball kids, I can’t believe lead actor Max Records has only been in a few other things. With that too-cool-for-school name, I do believe that Lance Bangs (aka Lester Bangs’s son, aka Mr. Corin Tucker) discovered him. That said, there isn’t a false moment in his multi-faceted performance. Also, I feel a little weird about this, but he’s a total hottie-to-be, not unlike Emma Watson when she starred in the first few Harry Potter movies.
Hipster pre-teen idol; image courtesy of weloveyouso.com
As for the sounds, two things struck me about this movie that I haven’t fully processed but stay with me long after the initial viewing. One is the score. I’ve been thinking about Karen O and Carter Burwell’s work here for some time. I listened to the soundtrack after Stereogum posted it. On its own, it was pleasant and at times interesting, but seemingly not of a piece. With the visuals, however, the songs Karen O put together with Burwell and as one of the Kids take on new resonance. Her vocals also seem to help us orient and empathize with Max. Using a woman’s voice to identify with a boy protagonist is interesting, and certainly plays with notions of queerness, androgyny, and between-ness. This ambiguity was something that seemed possible in some of the M.I.A. songs used in portions of Slumdog Millionaire that focused on protagonist Jamal’s childhood. It is certainly evident in the construction of Max’s pre-pubescent, slightly degendered, soft boy identity here.
A final thing that interested me that I hadn’t anticipated was the use of voice actors for the wild things. Forrest Whitaker, Catherine O’Hara, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, and James “Tony Soprano” Gandolfini lent their voices and considerable acting ability to create a whole different sense of aural corporeality and heightened realness to these otherwise fantastical monsters. When Ambrose’s KW tells Max “I’ll eat you up, I love you so” as she bids him goodbye as he returns home from his imaginary travels, I believe it and don’t forget the sound of her words.
