Where The Wild Things Are

Beautiful, surprising, funny, exhilarating, terrifying but with no re-watch value whatsoever, Spike Jonze's epic "Where The Wild Things Are" covers a broad range of emotions that makes it hard to believe that this evolved from a children's book. It may be based on the best children's book of all time (my opinion), but I wouldn't let anyone view this movie who is under the age of 10. This movie is for those who grew up with the book, who fantasized about running away to where the wild things are themselves, not those who are currently imagining it for the first time.

Obviously, the basic plot line from the book had to be included. Max acts like a wild thing, gets punished by mom, goes to where the wild things are, parties until he drops, realizes he misses his family, and then goes back home. If this is what you expect to get out of this movie, don't watch it, read the book again. If you want to watch yourself (if you're a suburban white kid, mostly) as a young child mature into a man or woman, then this is the movie for you.

Max was a bad kid in the book, but he is nothing compared to the Max of the movie (played pretty well by Max Records, if I might add). Quite simply, he's a little bastard. He's selfish, arrogant, vengeful and just not very nice. It's like someone took the very worst qualities of me and my brother and made a child, and for some reason he just has a costume with whiskers on it. One night, Max wants his mom to play with him, but she has a date. Max gets mad but comes down for dinner when she calls him. She wants to serve frozen corn, but Max, being the combination of me and my brother, jumps on the table and tries to assert his authority. God, I wanted to beat him. Like just beat him silly. I would use my pimp hand and everything. His mom tries to coax him down and he jumps on her and bites her. She cries out and asks him why he did that, and like any little kid he gets sad and wonders why everyone's mad at him now, so he books it out the door and runs away.

This is where the movie gets bearable. Somehow Max comes across a sailboat and launches into the water, eventually arriving at an island (the coniferous version of the island from Lost basically). He comes across strange big-headed creatures (created wonderfully by Henson productions) They want to eat him, but Max convinces them that he's a king and they elect him to be their new king. I won't ruin all the stuff in between, but like the book eventually Max gets sad and returns home.

After about a third of the movie (longer then I'd like to admit) I realized the wild things are aspects of Max's personality. He becomes friends with his crazy, vengeful side first, who is named Carol. There's his calm, reasoning side: a cockatoo named Douglas. A goat is the side of Max that feels left out and so on. The only Wild Thing that isn't a part of Max's personality is KW. KW represents every person in Max's life that he feels has abandoned him or left him behind for some reason (i.e. his mom and sister).

I can't state this enough but this isn't a children's movie. It's a maturing tale. It's Max's last great run as a wild little kid before he realizes that he needs to grow up before he hurts the people he loves. Max watches how his personalities interact (Calm, reasoning Douglas trying to control Carol, Carol overreacting and hurting the people he loves.) He discovers how the dangerous parts of himself look from the outside, and the awful way that they treat people.

The child in you will watch the wild roughhousing and dirt clod fights and feel like a kid again. The adult in you will feel what you felt as a child whenever you felt left out, abandoned or just ignored. "Where The Wild Things Are" shows you how fun it was to be a kid, but more importantly it shows you why you grew up.

Fairly amusing (wait for the scene with the owls, I giggled a lot) with intense overarching themes make "Where The Wild Things Are" a one time deal. Go see it, preferably a matinee, and you won't regret it, but I probably won't pick it up again. I'll just read the book.

Grade: 3 out of 4 stars


-Christopher O'Connell