Where the Wild Things Are just sort of, you know, ADHD

I’m sort of lost in the wilderness with this movie, so I’m hoping writing out my thoughts helps me work through some of my unresolved issues with this film – which for the life of me I do not get. Worse off, I can’t understand how people can sit through that film and come out with the idea that what they saw was successful on any sort of filmic or narrative level; that is worked; that it edified in any appreciable way. I don’t get why people liked this film, which is a big problem, because part of my job is knowing why people like certain films. (Although, to be honest, while dear Manohla all but went down on Jonze’s adaptation of Sendak’s children’s classic, the overall critic response has been, at least, divided.)

Lance Acord (Jonze’s right hand cinematographer) is a brilliant professional who has made a huge impact with his camera work. The general plucky intellect he brings to his vision perfectly matches Jonze’s own whimsical indulgences, and what we get is rare and perfect for a film like this. But here’s my gripe – Max rows his way on over to the Land of No Noons -- that is, as one photophile friend pointed out, a place where it’s always “magic hour,” always sunrise or sunset, always an orange and amber explosion drenching everything with meaning and metaphor and brilliance. This makes everything look fucking beautiful, do not misunderstand, but isn’t some of what’s going on in Max’s messed up brain NOT beautiful. Isn’t there room of drab decay, not only to vary our color palette, but as part of the metaphor system at work here – which is an exploration of the full gamut of a child’s psyche, the raging forces of his id? I fear that drenching the movie in so much light is bound to backfire, as it did in (the truly awful)) American Beauty – its sort of glorious to behold until you look back on it later and think: huh, that is sort of easy and manipulative and really…not that good.


Then again they could have gone the King Kong route and make everything absolutely horribly surreal (see the empire state building scene for one of the worst cinematic sunsets ever). But, like King Kong did, this movie really raised another question in my own mind (and, I’ll point out again, the minds of many highly-regarded professional critics) – where did the money go? Although movie budgets are kept notoriously close to the studio vest, it’s pretty commonly held that this is a movie that cost Warner Bros. one hundred million dollars. Sure, a hunk of that goes to Gandolfini-–and god bless the big lug—but seriously man! This is essentially an independent film, plodding and slow and deliberate: why do we need such extravagance? The monsters looked GREAT but the film in general didn’t deserve such brilliant design, didn’t deserve a budget that is ten times the GDP of the nation of Tuvalu. I suppose this is the old we’re-in-a-recession-yet-films-like-Beverly-Hills-Chicuachua-still-come-out debate, but I guess my caveat to the whole thing is that I don’t care if movies cost one hundred million bucks or Tuvaluan dollars or for that matter the actual island of Tuvalu itself – as long as they’re worth it.

And I just can’t help but feel this wasn’t. Beautiful opening as Max chases his family dog (though I sort of felt bad for dog?) and great unshowy work from Catherine Keener. But when Max gets to the island there just doesn’t seem to be much to do. The monsters should each represent an individual strand of Max’s inchoate urges –he feels no one is listening (Alexander); he longs for direction (Carol); he, uh, loves owls!(KW) – yet to me they come off as interchangeably whiny, babyish, neutered. From wild to mild in one, brilliantly lit, fell swoop.

There was so much talk about this being an ADULT movie, about how this isn’t meant for kids, about how it’ll be sad and scary and dark. Was it though? Nothing was scary – not for Max and not for the audience. We just march right in as Carol destroy those giant…um…tumbleweeds, jump into the action, become king, never look back. Darkness is an almost laughable notion in this film, for even the nighttime on Magic Hour Island cradles a big, bright, sleepy moon. And I mean that tonally-speaking as well; what is dark about Max destroying his sister’s room or hirsute muppets blithely deforesting an island? A dark children’s movie is The Neverending Story or, like, Bambi. What has been toted here as dark played out, for me, simply as boring (which by the way is what I heard most of out the mouths of the children who populated the theater I saw this in– not, I’m scared but I’m bored.)

Newbie Max Records seemed to work against himself in the film – he seemed so determined to be a good actor (and by many accounts he was) that he wasn’t exactly a realistic child. Best illustrated in the film’s final moment – which just kills me– Spike Jonze’s direction just rises to the surface and is spot on the nose in all the wrong ways. Seeing Catherine Kenner fall asleep while he slurps down Chef Boyardee, Max scowls in a moment of narcissistic annoyance. But then his sneers fades…he remembers what he has learned…he smiles at his sleepy mom. A moment so singularly prosaic, so cultivated, that I could just imagine the before-the-cameras-roll rehearsal, as Spike makes angry faces for Records to mimic playfully, than mellows out for a smile that will end the film. It’ll be my finest work thinks Jonze, as his child-actor beams at him through the lens.

But it isn’t his finest, not by a long shot. Like music-video-cum-moviedom’s other man-child Michel Gondry, without the structural discipline of Charlie Kaufman’s genius scripts, Jonze seems a bit lost-at-sea. A friend of mine who liked the film quite a bit told me I was ‘primed for disappointment” going in with such high expectations, which is really a comment that I keep returning to. Isn’t that why we go to films at all, because we respect the creative team? And especially here – delivered by the man who gave us Malkovich and Adaptation, and penned by Eggers, a writer who (even if he’s not as important as we thought in, say, 2000) is at least intelligent. Why should I have had anything BUT high expectations? I don’t judge a movie based on my expectations, rather by the actual experience of paying $6.75 for junior mints, and then sitting in a tiny chair while trying not to fall asleep. And for Wild Things that was a bit more of a struggle than it should have been. If expectations rule the day, I would have hated Inglorious Basterds (which I loved) and I would have issued a jihad against the makers of District 9 (which I liked quite a bit). This summer may not have been “great” or even “good” for movies, but it definitely had some wild rides. Eggers and Jonzes’ was just flat out tepid.

As a somewhat-aside, am I also the only one that sees a bit of a calculated, impure something underneath Jonze’s work? His childishness, somehow unlike Gondry’s, seems a bit more barbed – as if he saying: well I’m going to make it like this and to anyone who doesn’t like it I say I’M GONNA EAT YOU UP. It’s the old enfant terrible song-and-dance. Gondry is a child because he seemingly really is that way, really thinks that way. Yet to me Jonze is different -- he seems to recognize he’s found a niche – and he exploits it well. There seems to be a whole lot of young people out there that have found that their daily dose of intellectual self-congratulation is much easier swallowed with a cool glass of jouissance, one that reminds them how good it feels to be a child and not have to be so cerebral all the time. God bless Jonze for making movies for these people – I suppose I’m one – but I see now that his less-perfect offerings (I maintain the Kaufman-penned Jonze flicks are as good as it gets for film) expose his artifice a bit more than his art.

Oh well, bring on ANTICHRIST! Out this weekend!! Now there's a "dark" children's movie.