Watching Spike Jones and Dave Eggars’ adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved 1963 children’s book, I had an insight into the way children tend to read, and how great writers of books intended for them operate. Such works are detailed, but also only do just enough so that a young reader projects his or her young thoughts into the work, in essence claiming it for themselves. Sendak’s book dug into the heart of one of the core aspects of childhood, the part of a kid that is uncivilised, ill at ease in a world of laws and adult rigidities. Sendak appealed to the primal soul even whilst giving it two of the supreme gifts of civilisation: the well-written sentence and the artful image, in showing how kids make friends with their demons, cope with fears, and try to embrace their innermost natures. His message essentially inverted centuries of fairytales as cautionary parables. Where the types of campfire folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm taught children to be scared of the edge of the light, Sendak suggested that deep in the woods with the monsters wasn’t such an awful place to be.
Jones’ and Eggars’ Where the Wild Things Are perhaps doesn’t look much like Sendak’s, or anyone else’s, but that could be adaptation in its purest form: they rebuild Sendak’s tiny story into their own little parable about life. That it’s far more wet than wild only indicates how diverse such individual takes are, and also what different times we live in. Sendak’s work was redolent of the growing counterculture of its era, attempting to psychically redefine young people’s sense of themselves. The fact that Sendak recently came out as gay only helped clarify its essential breadth of relevance: his story was about finding aspects of ourselves which social roles attempt to suppress and deny. Jones and Eggars’ screenplay is the product of an era in which people are disillusioned and half-hearted in their fantasies, for whom wildness is a distant and soggy mystery, and where the lid is always being jammed back on Pandora’s box.
Max (Max Records), in his everyday life, is coping with the loss of his father, through undefined circumstances, probably having left after divorce. His sister Claire (Pepita Emmerichs) has become too old to be his playmate, hanging out with some older kids who, when Max starts a snowball fight with them, crush the igloo he’s made in their overzealous play. Max, furious at his sister’s lack of interest, ascends into her bedroom and destroys a craftwork totem of love he made for her. His overworked single mother (Catherine Keener) is striking up a relationship with a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), something which starts Max first trying to play masculine overlord (“Woman! Bring me my dinner!”) in claiming man-of-the-house status for himself, and then into a convulsive rage at being spurned, biting his mother’s shoulder and dashing out into the night, stumbling through a forest, and boarding a sailboat for a mysterious island populated by strange beasts. After debating whether to eat him, they’re impressed by Max’s claims of magic powers and make him their king instead.
I had no love for Jones’ debut feature, Being John Malkovich (1999) and its follow-up, Adaptation (2002), which were amazingly cumbersome and alienated works for films that wanted to be engagingly nutty and soulful. But both were thoroughly engaged with the concept of role-playing as a constant correlation to the way people experience life, and Wild Things expands the template further, for it becomes clear that the wild things are at first substitute friends for Max and then, finally, mirrors to his own nature. Carol (voice of James Gandolfini) is his closest avatar, a bearish, sullen, needy dreamer who has a crush on KW (Lauren Ambrose) and a desperate urge to smash things that don’t work in asserting his desire for greater communal perfection amongst the populace of wild things.
KW herself keeps abandoning the group to spend time along and visit her two owl friends, Bob and Terry, whose supposedly wise and witty words Max and Carol can only discern as normal owl chirps. Ira (Forest Whitaker) and Judith (Catherine O’Hara) literalise Sendak’s supposed basing of the wild things on his old, ugly Jewish relatives looming over him as a kid, Ira a passive mensch and Allison a sniping, self-pitying boor who accuses Max of playing favourites. Goat-like sook Alexander (Paul Dano) is generally ignored and used as a target, and passive but canny Douglas (Chris Cooper) lets himself be used as a cannonball in Carol’s destructive fits.
The wild things, then, evoke both a mob of other misfit kids, a fractious family, and jostling aspects of Max’s personality and emotional reflexes. They also often sound and act a little like the characters hanging about a group therapy session at a small mental health facility. Max’s fantastical ideas and inspirations for how they can reinvent their world inspire them to build a colossal, geometric fortress (an image which evokes another moment of grandiose solipsism in one of this year’s films, the edifice Dr Manhattan builds in Watchmen, and there are more similarities in the intention then one would think, with all the metaphors of power vacuums and temptations to become god), and coming up with raucous games that more often than not finally reveal the hang-ups and fault-lines in the group. Eggars comes up with some intriguing metaphors, like the hoots of Bob and Terry being unintelligible to Max and Carol, effectively delineating the way that popularity and the ambiguities of friendships are often incomprehensible to kids.
Meanwhile Jones and Eggars feel out the edges of social metaphor, studying the self-consuming desire for strong leadership and disappointed hopes: Max is “the first king we haven’t eaten,” as Ira confesses. Max’s being crowned king soon leads him, and the wild things, to admit the non-existence of true kings, a definite metaphor for Max’s coming to terms with his father’s absence. The realisation that Max is not a king drives the already fraying Carol to a fit of rage, ripping off Douglas’s arm, then chasing after Max with a mad intention to eat him, forcing Max to hide within KW’s stomach, whilst she delivers to Carol the same accusation his mother hurled at him: “You’re out of control!”
If there’s a disagreeable undertone here, it’s that Jones and Eggars often seem to be more intent on satisfying their own alt-culture conceit, which disbars both highs and lows, passion and mess, to make finally not a film that children can relate to but a film they want children to relate to, not the same thing. Sendak’s book celebrates wildness: Jones’ film encourages its being corralled. Kids (and me!) love being terrified and provoked as well as reassured; Jones offers a conflict resolution session. There are many droll, cute, and intriguing images – the delightful Bob and Terry; the holes in the trees that Douglas makes which Carol tells Max aren’t his: “The trees around them are yours, not the holes!”; the forlorn fake arm made of a twig that Douglas sports after Carol rips his other one off. But any hoped-for unruly energy is sucked out of the film, and what is left is where the wussy things are, a touchy-feely parable about the dangers and necessities of growing up.
In short, it’s both square and safe, which is the opposite of the point. The visual invention and knowing wit that was Jones’ trademark in his beloved music videos seemed to desert him in adapting Charlie Kaufman’s stunt screenplays, and even here he fails to capture anything fervent or dreamlike: his direction, whilst graceful and intimate, is never less than literal. One quality that does remain, providing the film’s texture, is a portrait of longing as a perpetual state, well evoked in Carol’s final howl to a departing Max, which carries a real, if low-key, almost mournful emotional charge. Both Max and the wild things, are creatures longing for things better than they are, and Max’s progress is of learning to value what he has. Which isn’t really particularly exciting or novel; in fact it comes close to restoring the campfire tale moral Sendak was taking time out from. Finally, Where the Wild Things Are is an affecting film, but it sure isn’t wild.
