Cast: Max Records, Catherine Keener, (voices) James Gandolfini, Catherin O’Hara, Paul Dano, Forest Whittaker

Director: Spike Jonze

Screenplay: Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers

Running time: 1 hr 41 mins

Genre: Drama/Fantasy/Family



CRITIQUE:


Cinema loves childhood chronicles. From the glorious (Cinema Paradiso) to the painful (Les Quatre Cents Coups, Ivan’s Childhood), from the enchanting (E.T.: Extra-Terrestial, Spirited Away) to the darkly sinister (Pan’s Labyrinth), there is not a better landscape to explore the raw emotions of childhood experience other than the silverscreen. For any auteur with an artistic vision, there’s always a child lurking in the past, once filled with daydreams of flights and fancy. This is true with director Spike Jonze, who is pretty much a delinquent who works against the Hollywood system, returning back to his childhood roots to bring us Maurice Sendak’s universally popular children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. And there is not a better film this year that explores a child’s psychology than Jonze’s film.


Transposing a 30-odd line poem into a beating, breathing film is incalculably a difficult job – and in an almost two-hour length, we’d somehow expect Wild Things will be padded by sing-along show tunes and colourful monster merriment worthy of a Saturday morning children’s telly extravaganza between a very slender plotline. Except that these sheepish things do not happen, and shall never be under Jonze’s sensitive shepherding. Instead his interpretation of Wild Things is a melancholic, bittersweet evocation of childhood that isn’t really for children but for the adults to understand the condition of a child, of what it means to be innocent, to laugh, to cry, to run wild. Viewers could easily gripe about the lack of plot thereof, where nothing much happens. To disagree with that view, we seem to have forgotten that the best films about childhood in the history of cinema weren’t really plot-driven but rather explorations on psychology and situations. See Antoine Doinel’s embittered youth in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows or Ivan’s brutal despondency in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, these are films that touch the subject matter without a deux-ex-machina ridden plot but instead told with scepticism, and at the same time, wonder, of a child’s psyche given the situations they are walled in.


The rambunctious Max, played to a vibrantly natural performance by Max Records, is sent to his room as castigation for unruly behaviour and biting his Mum (Catherine Keener) in his wolf suit. For anyone who grew up with Sendak’s tale, it’s a brief summary of a child punished, figuratively runs away to the land of the Wild Things, and comes back transformed in the eve of his childhood. Pain is scarcely told in the book, and with the collaboration of Jonze and writer Dave ‘The Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius’ Eggers brings out tenderness and sorrow in the screenplay that haunts Sendak’s work. Here, Max is an ignored kid, barely comprehending his parents’ divorce and his older sister’s swaying into adolescence, as he becomes detached, inarticulate, and emotionally impervious to the misery around him. Hence, when he runs away (he does not scamper into his room, as the book has shown), he barely understands that he is also ironically retreating into his imagination.


Which leads us to the Wild Things. Every single creature is a labour of love. The pack is a collective technical ingenuity, marrying vintage puppetry with CGI-motions that enhance the emotionality and corporeality of these creatures. Flawless rendition is also coupled with pitch-perfect voice-casting, with standouts James Gandolfini as tempestuous Carol, Catherine O’Hara as the insecure Judith, Lauren Ambrose as the outsider KW and Paul Dano as self-piteous Alexander. It also doesn’t take a genius to notice that these monsters are the incarnation of Max’s inner emotional conflicts, with each feeling represented in each creature. The symbolism here is wonderfully captured by Jonze, where the giant fortress the creatures build actually signifies Max’s pursuit of a caved-in comfort, which in the real world does not exist. And when Max bids goodbye to the Wild Things, we see him waving farewell to these inner childish creatures and sails back to the land called Growing Up.



VERDICT:

For anyone who expects a time-ticking plot de rigueur to a Disney film shall be immensely disappointed. But for anyone who wants to experience a nostalgic, melancholic, bittersweet evocation of childhood, watch Where the Wild Things Are with both an open mind and an open heart – and no sooner than you see young rebel Max returning into his mother’s embrace, in a beautiful, wordless epilogue, you’ll find yourself touched. Jonze’s film, just like Max, is flawed and it’s the way it should be.



RATING: A-