After six years of painstaking work and a much-publicized tussle with Warner Bros. over the original — and reportedly much darker — cut, Spike Jonze has reached the end of his journey into both the world of Maurice Sendak and the shark pit of studio filmmaking. That the fruit of his labours is so visually splendiferous and defiantly idiosyncratic marks some kind of triumph. But seeing as Jonze’s adaptation of Sendak’s 1963 kid-lit classic Where the Wild Things Are may be the most depressing and distressing children’s movie since the rabbit apocalypse that was Watership Down, one has to wonder whether the director’s objectives were as sound as his ability to carry them off.
Jonze states that his new film is not a children’s movie. Instead, he “set out to make a movie about childhood,” a loaded phrase that should alert hipster parents to the film’s possibly deleterious effects on their progeny.
Given that Sendak’s book contains a mere nine sentences, a straightforward adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are would have been impossible — or at least very brief. Writing in collaboration with Dave Eggers (who’s also authored The Wild Things, a novelization of their script), Jonze expands and deepens the core tale of the rambunctious Max, adding details that flesh out our young hero’s life in the real world as well as his relationships with the monsters he leads in their infamous “wild rumpus.” As spirited and affecting as the results often are, it can still feel less like an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are than an adaptation of two windy psychotherapists discussing the function of archetypes and heretofore hidden anxieties in Sendak’s original.
No wonder Max and his monsters struggle to move under all that extra weight. Only the early scenes convey the feeling of exhilaration that’s so intrinsic to the source material. The film re-imagines Max (played here by Max Records, who’s capable but too limited to accomplish all that’s required of him) as a lad who longs for the attentions of his stressed-out single mother (Catherine Keener) and increasingly absent adolescent sister. A tantrum sends him out into the night and toward a strange island.
As Max first glimpses the giant, furry creatures that inhabit this unlikely landscape (i.e., forest or desert and nothing in between), they busy themselves by smashing holes in huts and trees. They speak with voices that sound familiar, and not just because they belong to actors like James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara and Chris Cooper. They’re familiar because they’re the voices we keep hidden in our heads, the ones that vent our feelings — sadness, envy, anger, joy, worry — in their least diluted and most volatile forms.
Though Max swiftly succeeds in getting them to accept him as their king, he spends the rest of the movie contending with what the wild things really represent. For instance, it doesn’t take a Bruno Bettelheim to see that Carol (Gandolfini) variously functions as Max’s ideal playmate, the father missing in the boy’s real life, the embodiment of his rage and a terrifying demonstration of its ultimate impotence. Likewise, Judith (O’Hara) stands in for his mother when she’s in chastising mode, as well as his innermost heckler — it’s she who scores the most laughs, bitter as they may be.
So while the monsters do occasionally get around to having a dirt-clod fight or building a fortress, but their predominant activity is sitting around with forlorn expressions, seemingly crushed by the unbearable heaviness of it all. For every ounce of joy, there’s a pound of hurt.
The notes of grief and loneliness in Pixar’s summer
hit Up were a vital reminder that
complicated feelings have a place in a film for (or about) children. But the
kid’s-eye view of the world in Where The Wild Things Are
is so painful and grotesque, Jonze’s film ends up being far more reminiscent of
such pipsqueak horror shows as Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo
and Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy. The balance of light and dark in Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive is more likely what Jonze intended.
Yet the director and his team have certainly achieved their ambitions when it comes to deriving an intricately detailed and physically convincing universe from Sendak’s original artwork. The use of hand-held camera-work adds enormous vitality — cinematographer Lance Acord’s work here recalls his equally distinguished efforts on Being John Malkovich and Jackass: The Movie — to images and environments that are consistently mesmerizing.
Too bad Karen O and Carter Burwell’s indie-jamboree score is too primitive and predictable to do them justice. Indeed, these heavy-hearted monsters may require an altogether more brooding score. Or maybe just a soundtrack of moaning and weeping, like the one your young ’uns will provide on the long trip home from the multiplex.
ON A MORE PLEASUREABLE NOTE
The fragments that survive from the world’s first full-length feature film gets an audio-visual makeover with the help of Picastro. The local art-rock combo provides a live soundtrack for Pleasure Dome’s presentation of Finnish filmmaker Sami Van Ingen’s Just One Kiss: The Fall of Ned Kelly at
Cinecycle on Oct. 16. The combination should be a memorable one, given the
experimental nature of Liz Hysen’s perennially underrated band and Van Ingen’s
oft-bizarre restoration/re-imagination of The
Story of the Kelly Gang, a film that originally thrilled
Australian audiences back in 1906. (129 Spadina Ave., rear entrance, 8pm; $12,
$8 for members.)
On Oct. 15 at the Bloor
Cinema, Can-film renegade Lee Demarbre promises another brand of thrills. The
director of Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter hosts the
Toronto premiere of Smash Cut, an admirably gory homage to the blood feasts of
splatter-film pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis. Though it includes an
introduction by Lewis himself and a lead performance by Last House on the Left’s David Hess as a murderous movie
director, Cut
may be most notable for featuring another rare non-porn appearance by Sasha
Grey. The movie’s target demographic of sleazebag cinephiles will be stoked.
(506 Bloor. W, 9:30pm; $10.)