Max et les Maximonstres

It's taken Spike Jonze a while to write, film, edit and (after some wrestling with Warner brothers over the final cut) release his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. One who greatly admires filmmakers will wait especially for a filmmaker who takes his time in creating something after years of speculation. Now, the filmmaker who first came on the scene with Being John Malkovich, once again gives me a one-word response with this third film of his: Wow. Hot damn. That's two more. This is, simply, a classic work of film-making, but also on a particular subject that so few filmmakers even attempt to make let alone get right, which is what it's like to really be a child. Films that come to mind like this could also include the 400 Blows, Fanny and Alexander, (arguably) Tideland and E.T. Now here's another, and one that is directed with an original eye and an inspiration of texture and feeling, a look like out of our own wanted childhood playgrounds. Or some kind of playground.

If you don't know the story by Sendak- and to be fair it's only several pages long and its story was *loosely* used for this film- is about Max, who, not entirely pleased with his life in the real world ventures into the world of the 'Wild Things', a place where he can be king (or rather makes himself one) and tries to create a paradise with his fellow creatures. This is the main bit of what the story is "about", but how it's about it is a whole other matter. It's a movie children can see and hopefully adore, but it's more than that. What it's going for is childhood itself, what makes up a young guy who has little experience in the real world and can only really see things through imagination and in a prism of what the 'real world' represents.

We see Max in class, for example, learning about how the sun works in relation to Earth. It's a truthful but pessimistic lecture (considering to elementary school kids no less) about how one day the sun will die, and so will all life. This is carried with Max when he ventures into the world of the Wild Things, and when he mentions this to Carol there's a perplexed response to this. "It's so small," Carol says of the Sun, and while it doesn't bother him at the moment it later comes back as a bit of real inner turmoil that Carol can barely contemplate. Or anyone else for that matter. Can one really be expected as a child to understand the full scope of the sun dying out and life as everyone knows it ending? It may be billions of years away, but to a little boy it could be just around the corner.

That, by the way, is one of the brilliant things about the movie - all of Max's collected experience, and who he is as a person, and what he can see and understand around him in his family and surroundings, is represented in the bunch of Wild Things. All of Max, indeed, is split among all of them: Carol, KW, Douglas, Ira, Alexander, and a particular 'quiet' Wild Thing that barely says a word, they're all Max, and yet because of their split pieces they're never fully whole either. This makes it easy, perhaps, for Max to be crowned as their king (hey, he did lead vikings after all!), and to lead Carol's dream of a fortress for them all where "everything you would want to happen would happen." There's magical moments experienced among them, and all of the Wild Things, thanks to the Jim Henson creature shop work, are all in front of us and live and breathe as real things in this set of 'wild' locations (woods, desert, beach, rocky coast). As soon as you can open up yourself to these being real beings, not just animatronics, the whole emotional core of the film opens up as well.

But oh, it's also such an unusually, beautifully realized film. From its vivid and in-the-moment use of hand-held cinematography (and, sometimes, the stillness of looking at the creatures and Max in the backdrops), to the songs from Karen O. that are always supportive of the scenes (never the obtrusive kinds in other kids movies), to the complex relationships between all of the characters that one can see reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz, it's a piece of pop-art that lets the viewer in. Its welcoming, refreshing and kind of staggering to see someone who knows the way children think, and how we don't have to be a mixed-up little boy to identify and see ourselves in Max (and, also, how we can't fully identify with things as a child like divorce, re: Carol and KW's 'friendship'). Where the Wild Things Are works as spectacle and comedy, and as the best Jim Henson movie the man never made, so it works for children. But for adults, because it's really about *us*, it can work wonders for us too.

Let the wild rumpus start!

A beautiful, audacious, roughly-hewn motion picture (adjectives that are no doubt overused in describing the picture's modus operandi), Spike Jonze's adaptation Maurice Sendak's adored children's book "Where the Wild Things Are" taps into the innocent, volatile world of a 9 year old boy the way few mainstream feature films have. It is original, unique, melancholy, and because of this several mainstream critics (and even lucid critics like Salon's Stephanie Zacharek) have derided the film. "There's no story"; "kids won't like it"; "it's an adult film about children, not a children's film"; "it's boring"; "the pacing is slow"...

What? Why did it become such a crime to make an abstract art film within the spineless confines of the Hollywood system? Doesn't Spike Jonze get credit for personalizing, therefore, retaining a substantial amount of voracity while delving into one of the most revered children's books of the last fifty years? What the hell is wrong with that? I understand that some people just don't respond to the abstract, pseudo-verisimilitude of pretentious art films, but there's a stripped-down purity to this picture that cannot be denied. It's not pretentious, but emotional and honest.

It's bold, it takes chances...why is it being chastised in the media? How often do we get movies like "Where the Wild Things Are"? It should be celebrated, not snidely dismissed (Ex. Lou Lumenick, NY Post).

I attended an early screening with my 8 year old daughter; we're both big fans of Sendak in general and this book in particular, and I quite like Spike Jonze as well. But this did not prepare us for the moody, almost downbeat atmosphere through most of the film, nor the sense of immediacy and almost hyper-realism combined with astoundingly fanciful imagery. It is such an odd movie! And yet, when it was over, we turned to each other smiling a melancholy smile and said, "I loved it." The expansion of the tiny story into a feature-length film is so subtle that you barely sense it happening. There isn't an artificial new plot laid over the bones of the original -- it's simply expanded at every turn and very gently stretched out to feature length. The voice performances are wonderful, and the costumes are magnificent, as is the one major visual addition to the material (which I won't give away). Enjoy!

Where the Wild Things are is a well written, intelligent, and very cold drama about the often challenging interactions within a closed group of people, the complexities of leadership and the cost of selfishness.

It's not a movie about imagination or childhood at all, and it's only vaguely concerned with themes of growing up, family or maturity.

It's not wacky or funny. Not colorful or exciting. There's only about 10 minutes of what I'd call "fun" in the whole 2-hour package.

That doesn't make Where the Wild Things Are a bad movie. It just makes it completely defiant of the viewer's expectations, and thus a rather confusing film to watch.

The first time I saw this I wasn't sure how I was supposed to be taking things. Was that supposed to be funny? Is she being sarcastic, or serious? Is Max in real danger now, or not? That's not because the movie is actually confusing, but because it all seems vaguely wrong and inappropriate. I left scratching my head saying "I guess that was good?"

In the end I decided I didn't like it. I felt that this was either the wrong script for this movie or the wrong movie for this script. Either way, it didn't click for me and felt awkward to the end.

Nevertheless there is quality here, and I recommend you watch it yourself and reach your own conclusion.

This is a huge success, and I believe that it will reach that status now called "classic," being experienced over and over in whatever ways that classics will in the future.

I'll let others note the purity in the way that sharp childhood is evoked. It is the emotional center of the thing. I'll be more interested here in noting the cinematic use of space. Jonze is famous for this, and how he can connect it to the folds in the narrative.

"Folds" in this context have to do with nesting of narrative elements. For instance the "real world" segments feature eating (twice), fort (twice), snowball fight, wild suit, pileon, pulling at toes, lost marriage, broken model of a heart, being king, son/sun dying and so on. The "wild world" features the same things twisted in ways that suggest the real narrative describing the inner character of Max. This "folding" gives us a place to stand and engages us more deeply, as a key narrative device. There is even a smaller inner fold where Carol (the Max surrogate) makes a model of his world, hidden in the desert. And another where Max enters KW.

I am more interested in the spatial folding. Yup, the way that Jonze has decided to set up and elaborate a vocabulary of movement.

Here's what we have, I think. I have only seen this once and will have to wait for DVD study to confirm it.

The scenes I am working with here are the ones with physical motion, where both the camera and the subjects move: the dogchasing, snowball fight, the amazing encounter with the waves when approaching the island, the rumpus and then the dirtball fight. Frozen motionpaths are in the fort's appendage, the "pile," and indicated by the stickweaving in the global fort and houses.

I believe these all use the same motion template. When someone invents a movie annotation tool where we can find and describe this, it will be easy to check and show. Right now it is an impression, but I got the feeling when watching that wave scene (in IMAX) that I would see the same motion paths in the forthcoming rumpus. Perhaps it was the appearance of the ululating sound that was used every time something got frantic, and by that time twice already. Perhaps it was the obvious reference to the Hokusai woodblock ("The Great Wave off Kanagawa"), where a wild wave becomes an actor, a wild thing dwarfing an iconic mountain, whose shape I thought I also saw on-screen.

I would not be surprised either if Spike used a sigla to denote this motion (like Joyce does in "Finnegans Wake") and that the sigla was KW, denoting the actual paths, the K in plan and the W in the vertical plane. Thus, KW swallowing/eating Max, apart from the obvious vaginal association also takes on a deeply cinematic one, worthy of "Adaptation." I know the work on this was done in Melbourne. Could it be that this apparent one-man shop "Digital Rein" managed this? In an unconnected area, am I misremembering? I recall the phrase was "Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!" (not "start").

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.