Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

VERDICT:
7/10 Vivid Imaginations

I’ve been racking my brain over this movie since I walked out of the theater, and while it wasn’t what I expected, I can’t say I’m disappointed.

Where the Wild Things Are is about a lonely kid named Max that freaks out and runs away from home after being ignored one too many times by his family. While wandering through the woods in his neighborhood, he discovers a sailboat, hops on in, and cruises on over to the land of the Wild Things where he is eventually embraced as their king.

If you haven’t read the book, you’re gonna have to take this movie with a grain of salt because that synopsis right there probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to you right now. Go read the book anyway, it takes five minutes to get through, it’s a freakin’ classic and chances are the person sitting closest to you has a copy of it in their bookshelf right now. Man, who didn’t grow up with this book?

Considering I’m not in that minority, to say I was excited to see this movie is the cinematic understatement of the year. The reality of Spike Jonze spearheading the film adaptation of the book my parents had read to me an ungodly amount of times as a kid had me sold from the get-go. It also helped that it was being promoted with the best trailer I’ve seen in a long while.

Great book + great director + great trailer = giddy Aiden.

So yeah, expectations were high.

But after finally getting the chance to see it, I’m still not really sure what I think about all of it.

In terms of remaining faithful to the source material, everything’s there. But how couldn’t it be? There’s hardly anything there to begin with. And that was what I liked most about the story, when it kept things simple and went by what the book had already laid out. But considering that you can’t take a five-minute children’s book and turn it into a nearly two-hour long movie while keeping it verbatim, something had to be added. This was to be expected, but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

In short, it’s not simple. Not in the least.

And this is where things got kinda muddled for me. Once Max reaches the Wild Things, the story takes on a whole different tone. It ends up becoming about Max trying to fix the Wild Things’ problems, to take away their loneliness and make life good again in the limited ways he knows how. This role he takes on as their king and savior in a way puts a mirror up to his own circumstances and mindset as a Wild Thing himself, or at least a Wild Thing in wolf’s clothing. In certain ways it’s an interesting a story about growing up, about family, about having good intentions but producing adverse results, but it’s all really, really complicated, more so than it probably needed to be.

I can appreciate what Jonze was going for here, but somewhere in the process it seems like things got a little lost in translation. It was hard for me to understand the significance of certain scenes and certain relationships amongst the Wild Things along with Max’s role in their lives, and believe me, I was trying really hard to break it all down. I’ve been struggling to come up with a way to explain how and why the story here was so difficult for me to follow, but it’s something you really just need to interpret for yourself as it requires a surprising amount of thought and analysis from its viewers.

I’m also not really sure what audience this movie is catering to considering that it’s a children’s movie with a story line that no child can really understand. The parents are probably going to get more out of its astoundingly mature message than any of their kids will.

But aside from the storyline which I’m still not sure is a good thing or a bad thing, Where the Wild Things Are is still an absolutely stunning movie to sit back and marvel at. The visuals seem to be ripped right out of a child’s dreamscape and brought to life by Spike Jonze as though they were his own. The trailer’s just a taste, but you really have to see it for yourself to get that full, delicious serving.

The reason I love Spike Jonze is that he’s all about making movies that are fun, that remind us that our world is really something else to behold, and Wild Things is probably his most accomplished display of both these notions so far. Okay, ending my “Ode to Spike” at that.

The voice acting is also very good considering that it’s got one hell of an all-star cast behind incredibly believable and emotive Wild Thing puppets/costumes. Max Records is also solid as Max – which happens to be the first acting role of his life (lucky). Cool name, too. He could be a super hero if this acting thing doesn’t work out.

And since it’s not every day I come across directors with great taste in music, there’s also a great soundtrack here by Karen O. from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to go along with it all. I might even go ahead buy that soundtrack. It’s that good.

Anyway, I should wrap this up, this is ridiculously long for my taste. I’ve tried my best, but it’s still pretty hard to put down into words the kind of experience I had and you’ll have with Where the Wild Things Are. What you see will take your breath away, and for that reason alone I would recommend it, but I think I’m going to need to give this one another watch to really get a better grasp on everything it was trying to say. But still, give it a shot, it’s the most original thing you’ll see all year.

Now I just need to figure out where the hell I get one of those wolf suits…

SIDE NOTE:

Dear WordPress Staff,

Thank you for being so painfully awesome and putting this post on your home page. You’re the bomb, WordPress is the bomb, you totally made my day. Thanks for reading.

– Aiden