CinePhillyist Reviews ... Where The Wild Things Are

"That very night, in Max's room, a forest grew and grew and grew, until his ceiling hung with vines and walls became the world all around."

With this sentence, Maurice Sendak added Max's bedroom to literature's map of magical portals—otherwise known as the rabbit hole, the wardrobe, and Platform 9 3/4. We can remember lying on our beds as children, exhausted from crying about some loneliness or injustice, wishing for such an opening to rescue us. Mystical thoughts arise just then—in the period after tears and before sleep—when violent emotions pass and the mind becomes eerily calm. Objects look clearer. Details are noticed. And, for a second, we wouldn't be surprised if a wizard, or a talking rabbit, or a furry monster walked through the wall and started talking to us. This is the space where the wild things are.

It makes sense that Spike Jonze would honor Maurice Sendak's request to turn Where The Wild Things Are into a screenplay. In Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, Jonze enjoyed using the perspectives of eccentric characters to reconstruct life's ordinary conventions; Sendak's story, which reminds us of how children make sense of the world through imagination, gives him a very different context in which to explore this theme. Jonze (who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Eggers) directs a wonderful young actor in the role of Max (Max Records). Charming, selfish, and sad, the character earns our empathy ten minutes into the movie. We cheer as he runs from his mother to the land of imagination. And then we wish he would return straight home so the movie can end.

The children's book focuses on the adventures of Max in his house. After his mother calls him a "wild thing," Max says he will eat her. She punishes him by sending him to his room without dinner. His bedroom turns into an island as he enters, and he has an adventure with a group of monsters who make him their king before the smell of food draws him back home. In the closing scene, a warm meal awaits him in his room. Jonze's film takes us out of the house. We follow Max outside, in school, and on the bus, where he reflects on a comment that his teacher made about the sun dying. Later that night, we see his conflict with his mother, but instead of running to his room, Max runs outside, to a creek in his neighborhood. There, he finds a boat and steers it for a long while until he arrives at the monsters' island. At the end of the film, he runs back home to a worried mother (Catherine Keener)

By taking us outside the house, Jonze somehow takes us away from Max's imagination. The magic disappears before the boy's trip begins. So when he arrives on the island, we're ready to see Locke or Hurley or Jack—not a tribe of friendly monsters (Jonze didn't want animated creatures; onscreen, we see actors in wonderful costumes). Herein lies the problem with illustrating other people's fantasies: they are other people's fantasies. When dreams are articulated, even by the dreamer, they change form. They become different stories. Sometimes the translation is better. Sometimes it isn't. Maurice Sendak apparently handpicked Spike Jonze to transform his vision. But in Jonze's version, that mystical bedroom moment disappears: Max goes to the fantasy—it doesn't come to him. And by having Max run away from home and cause his mother grief, the film substitutes selfishness for some of the book's innocence, an act that deflects attention from the imagination.

Most of the film takes place on the island, but when Max arrives, the screenplay hasn't yet earned our complete willing suspension of disbelief. We have enough to accept the costumes, perhaps, but not enough to believe the creatures are anything but disgruntled adults: stressed out, argumentative, and eager for a child's vision to help them escape their problems.