Where The Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are: Everyone knows what it is; the quintessential children’s story; a creative imaginative story that left every children book author from Dr. Sues to Fredrick Nietzsche seething with envy. The story is simple; A child named Max is a tad bit of a jackass, so he gets sent to his room without any supper (A fate that made all of us quiver when we had our parents read that to us.) Max feels that he’d be better of in a land where the wild things are, so he conjures up some lovable monsters and they have themselves a party (Or rather, a rumpus). After some fun, Max comes to the same realization that MGMT came to in Time to Pretend, and Max goes back home where his real family is. That’s a nice little story, isn’t it.
Now let me tell you about a movie based on that pleasant book and foundation of our childhood. Imagine you have bi-polar disorder, a view on life similar to the latter of the two authors I mentioned previously, and read “Where the Wild things Are” while simultaneously reading Feud’s “Die Traumdeutung”. That night, your diagnosed with every disease ever (even the ones that could only be obtained by eating fecal matter of an ape native to Series-of-Unintelligible-Clicks, Africa) And every person you are related to suffers 3 heart attacks. You have nothing, so you decide to get out that Colt-45 that you haven’t used since back in the day, but right after you finish the suicide note to your friends and remaining relatives, hold the gun up, and are about to pull the trigger you say to yourself “wait, wait, wait. Fuck this shit. I’m gonna make a movie”. This would be an accurate description of how this film came into being.
The story we are given in the movie is very similar to the book, but with a completely different idea in mind. Max (Max Records) is feeling alone in his life. His sister is in her teenage years and doesn’t want to talk to him, his mother (Catherine Keener) is to busy dating Mark Rufflalo to play with him, and his teacher told him in class today that the sun will eventually burn out and everyone will die (presumably right after he told them that their dogs didn’t really go to a farm, Spongebob isn’t real, and their grandparents are playing soul shuffleboard in hell with Santa Claus and Mr. Rogers).* So Max, fed up with the cruelty that real life has shown him, decides that he will run away from home. He runs though the woods, takes a sailboat across the sea, and ends up in a new land where he finds a group of monsters/aspects of his own mind, which are the Wild Things. There is Carol (James Gandolfini)/Max’s doubt, rage and sadness; KW (Lauren Ambrose)/ creative, and adventurous; Ira (Forest Whitaker)/ Understanding, and caring; Judith (Catherine O’Hara)/ Hopelessness and jealousy, Douglas (Chris Cooper)/ Courage and reason, Alexander (Paul Dano)/ Loneliness and Awkwardness and Bull/ Shyness.
These emotions are not just confined to the characters. The movie has an excellent way of establishing these emotions in certain scenes. Every scene has a clear mood that it’s trying to present, and it works tremendously in most scenes. The scenes where everyone rejoices their first day of having a new king, and Carol and Max’s discussion on the devolving of the world and possible death of the sun how completely different tones and it works wonderfully.
The writing in this movie is simple but so well done. Since the monsters are all creations of Max, they all talk like Max, and they all learn from each other. Max’s self-journey shows him something about himself and the world that he lives in. Granted, what it shows him is that the world is cruel, people suck, and exposes him to the fullest of Hobbsian theory (Thank God he didn’t make a rule that only the one with the conch shell could speak).
There are some complaints I have. Some of the scenes become repetitive since, for the most part, the characters are static or suffer from Holden Caulfield syndrome*. As enjoyable as the characters are, they are held down by the fact that they each get 1/7 of Max’s personality and so many of the lines they say, or problems they face are the same thing. I eventually get quite angry with Carol since whenever there was something he would disagree with, he would storm away angrily and cause tensions to rise. There are times when the film seemed to drag on, and became repetitive in its conflicts (and there is never a lack of conflicts).
Now don’t get me wrong, I loved this film. It was just so amazingly depressing. I would recommend that parents take their kids to see it, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea since even today I can remember crying at the end of “Doug’s First Movie Ever” (But come on. They loved that sea creature so much. Why did it have to leave?)
But the real reason I would recommend it to kids is that its honest. The movie just sort of tells kids that “hey, this is life. Its shitty, people will push you down, you won’t get what you want, and God is dead” I guarantee you won’t get that harsh realism from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It also understands how kids think, and so it becomes so much more sincere when they have this real person doing what any kid would do. The interactions between Max and his mother, and Max and his sister and her friends are exactly what we do as kids (minus dressing in a wolf/bear/Sasquatch suit). And when Max is in the world of the Wild Things, we remember back to the days when we dreamed about that sort of thing; Where we left the constricts of reality and traveled to our mind’s utopia where…everyone suffers the same problems as those in reality. And this leads to why teens and adults should see it as well. It is an interesting character study of ourselves back in the day. This whole film is just watching the inner workings of this very strange child’s mind.
This movie was very well done, was far more then enjoyable, gives us an interesting look at the life and mind of a child, and although it was more depressing than Requiem For a Dream, it offers an important lesson conveyed through excellent writing, interesting characters, and a relatable yet original imagination.
Final Rating: 8.5/10
Children, wake up
Hold your mistake up
Before the summer turns to dust
And if the children
Don’t grow up
Our bodies get bigger
But our hearts get torn up
We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms
Turning every good thing to rust
I guess we’ll just have to adjust
-Arcade Fire
* If for some reason, Mr. Rogers did go to hell, he would have destroyed it in a day and taken his place at the round table next to Jesus.
*Holden Caulfield syndrome- when it is in the charters nature to prevent a story from developing or moving in an interesting direction.