Parents say how they love to live life through the eyes of their children, and oftentimes it's to experience all over again the joys and pleasures that the world has to offer. What is often overlooked is the other unfiltered emotions, conflicted feelings, and the enormity of little things that, to adults, may now seem trivial or inconsequential. It is those exact moments not only make up the majority of Where the Wild Things Are, but also make it so unsentimentally stunning.
Director Spike Jonze has used the short Maurice Sendak text as a blueprint, but more importantly, he uses the "feeling" of reading that book for the first time — the conflicted emotions young readers may feel when they view the whimsically smiling creatures from Sendak's brush, mixed with his text in which they threaten to devour our hero with their "terrible teeth."
Upon reading it to my own children, I can still recall my parents sharing it with me, my eyes scanning over the beasts' jutting incisors, their glowing yellow teeth, and watching them prance and frolic with their newfound human friend. I felt both fear for and envy of Max, the little boy sent to bed without supper.
The film version captures that unstable feeling of wishing that such a land did indeed exist, but being only able to project upon it the limited emotional world a young tyke has.
First things first, if you enter Wild Things, expecting a zany tale of raucous, party-hungry beasts rocking to the latest Fall Out Boy single, you are most certainly in the wrong film. Conversely, if you are expecting a sequel to the Denise Richards-Neve Campbell lovefest, you are most certainly in the wrong movie.
Like the wolf-costumed Max (Max Records), the film is an art film disguised as a more commercial endeavor. Jonze had repeatedly said the film is about childhood, not a children's movie. We meet Max through a stunning tracking shot (in a film filled with many a gorgeous moment, courtesy of cinematographer Lance Acord) as he engages in various forms of age-appropriate mischief and heartbreak.
Through this set-up, we catch glimpses of all the little things that lead to Max's confrontation with his mother (Catherine Keener). They may seem mundane to adults, but they weigh heavy on his young mind. After being reprimanded, Max seeks refuge in this creature-inhabited universe. It is fitting that Jim Henson Studios created the beasts, as Max's limited exposure to “monsters” were most likely that of the Muppet variety that populated a street called Sesame.
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