The world can be a nasty, depressing place. Suffering and sadness surround us daily, and yet, by some miracle, the human spirit survives. Somehow, we can, even for a moment, overcome the crushing weight of the world and enjoy the beauty and love that shines through the cracks. Well, at least most of us can anyway.
You know, it’s one thing to acknowledge the fact that it isn’t easy for kids to grow up on this sad and broken planet; it’s another thing entirely to wallow in its melancholy swamps. Where the Wild Things Are wallows. It stews in a life-sapping anesthetic bog of navel-gazing self-pity. Seriously, they might as well pass out kiddie Prozac at the door.
Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book seems pretty straightforward to me. A rambunctious boy named Max causes a ruckus, so his mother sends him to bed without dinner. As Max sits in his room, all alone with his imagination, a wild jungle filled with fierce monsters forms around him.
Max shows no fear. Impressed, the monsters crown him their king and he embraces the life of a wild thing, dancing and playing with abandon until he suddenly realizes that he misses his mother and the comfort of his home.
Sweet, right? Simple, certainly. Well, Spike Jonze adaptation is about as jarring and incongruous as a Care Bears Movie starring Marilyn Manson. In his heavy hands, this seemingly simple story takes on the color of a gloomy, post-modern diatribe.
Max is still imaginative and ill-behaved, but here he is also glum and peevish. Far from fierce and fun-loving, Max’s monstrous companions are hopeless and forlorn. I think they’d all be much more at home in a group therapy session. This film may be many things (in fact, I’m having quite a bit of trouble figuring out exactly what it is), but it’s certainly not for children.
I think Where the Wild Things Are may just be an angst-filled art house film with a killer marketing campaign. The movie’s promotional blitz and widely advertised release have effectively – and deceptively – mainstreamed some very outside-the-mainstream material. I suppose you could argue that Sendak’s original story carried some deeper emotional and philosophical context (although I must admit that I missed it) and that the quirky trailers made the film’s true colors clear to anyone who was paying attention – but on an important level, this feels like a betrayal of trust.
It’s a violation. In a very real sense, this story, that should (at least on its face) belong to children, has been hijacked by a team of writers and producers who instead seem much more interested in using the medium to spew all of their unhealthy psychological issues up on screen. Depression, anger, dysfunction, despair – it’s all here for young eyes to see and young minds to absorb.
I mean – come on – of the millions of stories in our culture; wouldn’t a rational person expect that this one should be all about letting a kid be a kid? And yet here we see a child with the weight of an entire world place upon his shoulders. When Max arrives in this mystical land, the wild things make him their king because he promises to bring them all together again and to “keep the sadness out”. But once jealousy and depression creep back in and destroy their harmony, the group turns on Max and suddenly threatens to eat him. Does this sound like something you want your child to hear? Do you really want them to absorb the stress of those kinds of impossible standards?
Now, I’ll give credit where credit is due. Spike Jonze and his team have done a wonderful job of realizing the look of Sendak’s original book. The production design is genuinely beautiful, and while the innovate technique employed to bring the monsters to life (using actors in costumes with CGI animated faces) doesn’t look quite as realistic as I would have liked, on the whole, the effect is appealing and visually arresting. The camera work is also very impressive. There’s a gritty realism to the close-ups and an energetic, documentary style in the handheld work and unique camera angles.
Unfortunately, no amount of visual panache could save this movie. Where the Wild Things Are is a supremely boring film. The most fundamental problem is that a narrative just few sentences long can’t really support a feature length film. I suppose if you were hell-bent on forcing the issue, you’d have to embellish the tale, and Jonze has chosen to embellish it not only with that crushing sense of despair, but also with a psych ward full of cryptic imagery and obscure symbolism.
Do the monsters represent different facets of Max’s personality or his perception of the people in the world around him? Are they adults or are they more like children? Does the emphasis on the fear of losing teeth have any relevant significance? What about the sequence where Max hides in a female monster’s belly to escape the rage of an angry male monster, or the scene where the group all sleeps together in a giant, furry pile? You’d need an advance degree in philosophy to sort it all out, and unless you’ve got a little Freud or Jung on your hands, absolutely all of it (save the general sense of tension and discontent) will escape your child.
Judging the objectionable content in this film is difficult. Where the Wild Things Are more often breaks the spirit of the law rather than the letter. There are two instances of minor profanity and a smattering of violence. Max bites his mother, the monsters tackle one another and clobber each other with giant dirt clods, and one creature even rips the arm off of his companion (not as graphic as it sounds).
Of greater concern is the film’s spirit and attitudes. Max engages in loads of ill-tempered bad behavior and never suffers any consequences for his misdeeds. In fact, the end of the movie only reinforces Max’s belief that he is indeed the center of the universe.
Where the Wild Things Are likewise makes no attempt to shield children from the harsher realities of life. In fact, as I hope I’ve made clear, it instead revels in an incorrigible sense of depression, and never offers any sort of obvious or meaningful resolution.
I know life is hard. I know a lot of people are unhappy. But a willfully morose view of the world – such as the one in Where the Wild Things Are – is poisonous; and it seems doubly dangerous when coupled with a story ostensibly intended for children. Even if you believe that our existence is really this burdened and accursed, surely there’s no need to rub a child’s nose in it.
Caution Rating: 6.5
