First Hit: Although I left the theater with questions about how dark the film was, I was more struck at the beauty and excellent execution of this story.
The question that haunts me days after seeing this film is about why the film didn’t invite me into it emotionally?
There was very little about this movie that touched my feeling realm directly. However, from an intellectual realm, it was extraordinary and asked me to view my feelings, but from a distance. It was more about watching a young boy exploring and dealing with his dark, lonely, angry and sorrow fill world and I was an observer.
It was like watching life from in an atrium. From this place, Spike Jonze created an adult view of a children’s fantasy. Max Records plays Max the young boy who has temper tantrums and can be sweet as can be. Sitting under his mother’s desk fiddling with her stocking feet telling her a story was very sweet, compelling and engaging.
However as much as that was incredibly sweet, only to be juxtaposed with his outburst, while standing on the dining table, yelling at the top of his lungs that he was going to bite his mother for serving frozen corn instead of fresh corn showed the other side of the story.
Max’s life is one filled with fantasy as represented by the forts he sets up in his room, and the hard dose of reality as he pro-actively owns up trashing his sister’s room because she didn’t protect or help him when he started a snowball fight with her friends. He runs away from home and ends up in a land Where the Wild Things Are.
In this fantasy land there are very large animals with human voices. Carol (voice by James Gandolfini) is seen trashing everyone one else’s homes because KW (voice by Lauren Ambrose) is off with other friends. Like Max, he cannot control his anger and is severely insecure.
Other wild things see Max and immediately want to eat him. But Carol stops the threatening attack and Max announces that he is a former king and defeated the Vikings. This impresses the Wild Things so they crown him their king.
However, they begin to see that he doesn’t have kingly ideas and when he suggests they get into a dirt clod fight because it will be fun, people get hurt and luster falls from his crown.
Records was powerful as Max, as was Gandolfini, Ambrose, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, and Paul Dano as voices of the Wild Things. Jonze shot this film with a semi-documentary feeling in the camera movement and positions which were helpful to sharing the story.
Overall: As a children’s film it is too dark and intense, as an adult view of children finding their way home it was extraordinary.