Film review: Where the Wild Things Are

Published on Thursday 10 December 2009 18:01

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (15) ***** DIRECTED BY: SPIKE JONZE STARRING: CATHERINE KEENER, MAX RECORDS, JAMES GANDOLFINI, FOREST WHITAKER

LIKE the portal John Cusack uses to "experience the world through someone else's eyes" in Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze uses his long-gestating adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved Where the Wild Things Are to transport us so thoroughly and completely into the mind of his pre-adolescent protagonist, the experience of watching it feels almost too intense. A primal scream of pre-adolescent angst, it opens in astonishing, lightning-bolt fashion with Max (Max Records), a boy of about nine or ten, tearing down the stairs in a wolf suit in hot pursuit of the family dog. A little older than the hero of Sendak's slim tome, but no less rambunctious, he moves so fast, so chaotically, that the camera can barely keep up. It's an exhilarating start. Exploding the glossy, protective shield most family films deploy in favour of a raw, rough-edged aesthetic more akin to the films of indie godhead John Cassavetes, it's a shock to the system, but in the best way possible, shrinking the distance between us and Max's experience so completely that within seconds we're fully immersed in his world.

What follows are some the most honest, poignant and tender scenes of family life ever seen in an actual family movie. With only a handful of pictures and fewer than ten sentences of source material from which to draw inspiration, Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers begin their necessary expansion of the book by elaborating on Max's home life in ways that feel organic and true. In scenes that are heartbreaking, staggering and close to genius, we learn that Max is a child of divorce, that he's lonely and confused, and that he's very angry – about his lack of friends, about the fact that his older sister seems to be outgrowing him, and about the fact that his loving-but-harried single mother doesn't always have time to indulge his every whim.

Working with his usual cinematographer, Lance Accord, Jonze gets up close and personal with all this. When a friendly snowball fight ends in some older friends of his sister's wrecking the igloo he's spent hours constructing, the tears he unsuccessfully tries to fight back and sense of betrayal he clearly feels, hit with the force of a dirt-clod to the face. When he subsequently trashes her room in retaliation, there's a quite extraordinary scene of reconciliation as his mother, played by Catherine Keener, assuages his instant regret by silently helping him clean up his mess, fixing the personal treasures he's thoughtlessly wrecked. Keener does incredible work here. Saying more with a sympathetic smile and an understanding frown than any line of dialogue could hope to convey, her scenes with Max have the authenticity of a documentary, something the verit shooting style heightens.

But if the visual style is hand-held, there's no narrative handholding. This is not a film that strolls down life-lesson lane sign-posting morals and instructive themes in bold capital letters. It's messier, rougher and more fun; more like life. When Max explodes in a rage one night and runs away to a land full of fearsome furry creatures, he doesn't suddenly find himself on a clearly delineated quest to get home. There's no Yellow Brick Road to follow. Instead, as in the book, he encounters the titular Wild Things: a group of rampaging monsters who ask him to be his king. Brought brilliantly to life by a combination of oversized animatronic suits (lovingly designed by the Jim Henson Company, with CGI enhancing their facial expressions), and a wonderful voice cast led by James Gandolfini, the Wild Things are both faithful to their pictorial source material and a more explicit manifestation of Max's id. Their personalities are facets of Max's warring emotions and when he tries to get them to "be still" he's really trying to process what he's going through and trying to understand why he's feeling the way he does about his complex family life back home. Everything that happens to Max in the grungy fantasy scenes has been slyly prefigured in the earlier domestic ones and the film does a wondrous job of capturing both the way kids soak up information and feelings like a sponge and the way all that energy can be squeezed out of them in unpredictable ways when things gets too much.

Of course, there's been a lot written about whether kids will understand all this. Truth is, it doesn't matter if they don't. This is a film that works on instinct. It might take years for younger audiences to process what it means, but that's OK. One of the main reasons ET is pretty much the most perfect evocation of childhood on film is not because of the sentimental sense of wonder Spielberg created – any two-bit hack can get tears flowing – but because he filled it with painfully true and honest moments of family life that cut deep and hard. Where the Wild Things Are is full of similarly honest details that will likely resonate with kids (and adults) in ways, that – like Max – they're not quite able to process. As for Jonze, he's been criticised for regressing into childhood, as if it's not possible to make something meaningful out of a child's picture book. Pah! If grown-up cinema means having to pore over recent laboured works by cold souls such as Michael Haneke or the Coen Brothers, then give me Jonze any day. This is filmmaking hard-wired straight to the heart: wild, untamed and quite, quite brilliant.