What would it be like if Edmund, Lucy, Peter and Susan Pevensie could escape from wartorn Britain through the back of a wardrobe — only to be totally cool and blank about this new world of fawns and talking lions? Or if Dorothy and Toto could fly away from drab family strife to a multicoloured land of midgets and witches and yellow brick roads and yet remain shruggingly laidback about the evident contrast between this place and Kansas? My guess is that it would look like this film, Spike Jonze’s subdued, deadpan and even slightly depressive account of Maurice Sendak’s much-loved 1963 picturebook classic Where the Wild Things Are.
It has been expanded into a full-length psychological study of childhood loneliness and dysfunction, in which an unruly boy called Max explodes with unhappiness and rage at the frustrations at home — and runs off. He sails to a remote land occupied by vast Muppety creatures: gloomy, clumsy, quarrelsome beasts, who after some discord accept him as their king. Instead of screaming with horror and astonishment at these extraordinary talking animal-giants, Max calmly takes them at face value. In this way, Jonze’s movie intuits both the unjudging nature of a child and also an adult’s detached understanding that, being metaphorical, these beasts are nothing to be scared of.
Metaphors for what, though? The movie begins with a plausible sketch of an imaginative, lonely boy who feels neglected. He plays on his own — a much older sister hangs out with her much older friends. His mom (Catherine Keener) is affectionate enough, but clearly distracted by her job, some sort of freelance writing work that isn’t going very well. Then there is Max’s dad, played by Mark Ruffalo — but is this, in fact, his dad? Is he a stepfather or mom’s boyfriend? At all events, he is a pretty distant and unsatisfactory dad figure with whom Max has no obvious connection.
On a crisp snowy day, friendless Max has built himself a heartbreaking igloo-cocoon. Seeing his sister show up at the house with her cool friends, he prepares a snowball ambush, and we tense, expecting an upsetting put-down. But no; they join in gamely enough. The crisis comes when these big teenagers play too rough, hurting and upsetting little Max, and accidentally destroying his small igloo. Unable and unwilling to offer the tearful boy the necessary hugs of comfort, they just slouch off with embarrassed giggles, lighting the fuse for his later tantrum explosion and traumatised escape.
His new land itself has a weirdness that isn’t immediately obvious. It is partly woodland, partly rocky headland, leading to a windswept deserted beach bombarded with rolling, dangerous-looking breakers. Yet this stiff wind dies to nothing when Max traipses with one of the creatures through a limitless, whispering desert.
The movie grew on me. Dave Eggers is its co-writer, and his kidult literary aesthetic is an acquired taste. Yet I made one or two more steps here towards fanhood. Between them, Jonze and Eggers have created an intriguing oddity whose fate it may be to fall between the sensibilities of adults and children.
Jonze’s Wild Things is a rather dark, cold picture: a film about the way children can lose their fear of the world only by losing their innocence. Jonze’s design extrapolates the book very cleverly, but I have a feeling that loyal fans and family audiences looking for fun may be disconcerted. Jonze’s fans, on the other hand, will find that this director’s talents remain untamed. —