where the wild things are-engl

 With a minimal plot and a lush menagerie of monsters, this odd and famous children book absorbs adult readers and child listeners.

But this is not an action movie.  Nor, in the conventional sense, an adventure picture. In fact, it’s not really even a children’s film. And, while there’s astounding tricks in most scenes, you won’t even notice they’re there.

Where The Wild Things Are is, instead, a plotless, bittersweet piece that laments the inevitable passing of childhood. It is the delicate story of a solitary child, liberated by his imagination.

Jonze has managed to reproduce Sendak’s story as a personalised chamber-piece, where his own genetic material is indistinguishable from that of Sendak’s Max.

Max is a storm without warning, throwing himself into the story while chasing the family dog down the stairs, shot with a handheld camera that can barely contain the boy’s image inside the frame. Thus the boy, played with naturalism by new discovery Max Records, becomes the product of a broken marriage, standing on the verge of adolescence, but afraid to jump.  As if childhood is protecting him from a world where the love of his parents has decayed, where his elder sister is now cold and distant, and in which, as one of his teachers puts it, everything eventually dies — including the sun.




The world is cruel, children too, lessons that Max absorbs through tears and hurt. The wound doesn’t heal. Max clomps and then stomps and then erupts: he roars at his mother. She roars back. Therefore, Max conjures up the Wild Things. And, then, like everyone else, he sails into the world, adrift and alone.

It doesn’t take Freud to spot that each of these “monsters” represent aspects of Max’s personality at a time when he’s starting to realise the universe does not revolve around him.

Carol is Max’s creative passion; KW, of course, is Max’s love for his mother and sister, the people who make his world, and who he fears will abandon him. Judith is his cynical side, Ira is his calm side; Alexander portrays his insecurity, Douglas his reason, and the nameless bull - his sadness. Paradoxically, the Wild Things are deeply human, up to their mundane names.

You never question the creatures’ physical reality or emotions, thanks firstly to great work on the part of the voice cast, the cream of Indie talents, and to a knockout work of the Jim Henson Creature Shop on costuming and digital subtle face-work.

Yet it’s a different kind of physical reality. The Wild Things are large, but light, and nimble, like oversized cuddly toys. Or, indeed, like children.

Much is left unexplained in Jonze’s adaptation, including Max’s melancholia, which hangs over him, his family and his wild things, like a gathering storm. But childhood has its secrets, mysteries, small and large terrors…


Jonze’s movie it is not, however, all gloomy. It is also a celebration of childhood. A proper childhood, with dirty, rough outdoor play, where you get grit under your fingernails, where you build forts out of branches, play bundle and throw snow at each other’s heads, running, screaming, howling, without a care in the world.

Jonze keeps the colour palette and lighting natural. Nothing feels manufactured, even though the seasons on Wild Thing island are of a lyrical nonsense (blossoms spring by one moment, snow falls another). The wonderfully overwhelming sense you get is that the Wild Things’ world exists at the end of a summer holiday, where every second of play is desperately, sweetly savoured.

Jonze's regular cinematographer, Lance Acord, shoots fantasy with the simplicity of a home movie, with occasional shakes and beautiful accidents. Jonze’s shows the big picture in a wide angle here, as we do inside our heads.

But when, for example, the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that Max’s boat is simply a dot amid an overwhelming vastness.


This is the human condition, in two eloquent images.


giulia d
14 febr 2012