Wild ambitions

There’s a lot to like in the Spike Jonze feature-film version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, enough that it’s something of a puzzle that this long-awaited movie makes a rather limp impression overall.

The production’s remarkable combination of live action and extra-large animated puppetry is managed with superb technical skill, and the feature-length opening-out of Sendak’s classic children’s book (40 pages and 400 words expanded into 100-plus onscreen minutes) remains earnestly devoted to the original throughout.

The screenplay (by Jonze and Dave Eggers) delves into considerable analytical self-reflection on the primal issues of childhood fantasy that were mostly implicit in Sendak’s beguilingly compact tale.

The film’s handsome expansion of Sendak onto a larger narrative scale is one of its signal accomplishments, but that near-epic stroke of creativity does not come without costs. The Jonze-Eggers Wild Things is particularly interesting as a kind of retrospective meditation on Sendak’s original, but that interest is more cerebral than aesthetic, and more dithery-academic than richly emotional.

As widely noted even before the film’s release, the onscreen results seem geared mostly to an adult audience, and almost not at all to young children. The PG rating is not inappropriate, but the gentle grunge of the film’s imagery—in young Max’s home life as well as in the realm of his wild-thing fantasies—evokes an existential gloom that the Jonze-Eggers screenplay only tends to make more explicit.

Max Records is very good as the central child/narrator/king of the story, and his wistful half-lost innocence works nicely with that of the assorted puppet-figure caricatures voiced by Catherine O’Hara, Chris Connelly, etc. And Catherine Keener is amiably effective as Max’s frazzled mom, who here becomes both a fellow fantasist and a template for some of the cuddly-but-dodgy Wild Things who populate Max’s mildly instructive fantasy adventures.

Jonze and company deserve much credit for even attempting to make this kind of big-screen spectacle into a serious reflection on fantasy journeys to a “place where only the things you want to happen, would happen.” But I’m also a little sad that their efforts at envisioning what happens after Max chooses to “let the wild rumpus begin!” end up seeming oddly tame.