From Page to Screen
Where the Wild Things Are
movie review

by Claire E. Gross

The best way to enjoy the much-anticipated film version of Maurice Sendak’s beloved picture book (about a boy who, sent to bed without his dinner, journeys to an island of Wild Things, leads a “wild rumpus,” and then returns home to find his dinner still hot) is to simply let go of the book. While the basic structure of the book’s plot remains, its themes are not reinterpreted so much as entirely reconceived to create a very adult meditation on anxiety, abandonment, and loss that is at odds with the book’s loyalty to a child’s point of view — and taken on its own terms, the adaptation almost works.

Unfortunately, it seems filmmakers Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers haven’t made up their minds about whether their creation is for adults or kids, and the resulting tug-of-war between perspectives makes for an uneven, if innovative and provocative, film. Having departed radically from the original text, they then borrow from it in odd places, so that familiar lines seem misplaced or reapplied so far out of the original context as to be nonsensical. The tone veers from jagged realism to soothing parable. Nevertheless, it’s the movie’s willingness to run with its new themes, darker than those of the book (yet, paradoxically, more invested in the underlying innocence of childhood) that allows it a measure of success.

The fundamental divergence between book and film is the film’s pathologizing of the very wildness the book celebrated. Sendak’s original illustrations depict Max’s “mischief of one kind and another” as organic to the boy’s imagination: as he chases a dog and nails a makeshift tent into the wall we are meant to think he is playing, not acting out. Later, his expression is of smug, primal joy as he and the Wild Things enjoy their wild rumpus. The movie’s back story — that Max is the product of a broken home, abandoned to various extents by mother, father, and older sister — suggests that this wildness is not endemic to childhood but the product of external trauma.

The psychological subtext (which unfortunately fails to stay sub as the movie progresses) is obvious but compelling. Each Wild Thing embodies a different aspect of Max’s psyche — his anger, loneliness, disaffection — and to watch him interact with them as separate personalities and attempt to exert control over their neuroses, becoming in the process his own parent, is fascinating as allegory even as it becomes long-winded in practice. Meanwhile, with the introduction of this conceit, the Wild Things themselves are largely de-clawed in the face of larger, more adult anxieties (not least of which is the finite nature of existence). There is no gnashing of terrible teeth and very little roaring of terrible roars; the Wild Things are more pouty than dangerous, and Max is a manipulative, ineffectual king, a far cry from the mercurial but triumphant ruler of the book. The movie’s moments of true danger, in particular the war scene, have the potential to be profoundly disturbing, but are too often defused by the Wild Things’ carefree, childlike laughter — as if to say, It’s all in play. The juxtaposition doesn’t make for an interesting ambiguity so much as it seems a failure to commit.

Despite this confusion, Where the Wild Things Are is a stylish, moving film; the stellar acting and production values are worth seeing in their own right. Max Records, playing Max, is emotive and without affectation; his nuanced, natural performance represents the film’s most organic representation of childhood. The music is bizarre and whimsical, often enhanced by screams or animal noises or childlike humming, helping to meld the realistic with the dreamlike. The island of the Wild Things is desolate and beautiful, the images saturated with natural light, and the frenetic camera-work during the film’s wilder moments heightens the sense of an out-of-control world and character.

Claire E. Gross is associate editor of The Horn Book Magazine.

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