In Theaters: Where the Wild Things Are

The opening scenes of Where the Wild Things Are capture a very specific moment in childhood anomie. It's a barely post-70's, post-divorce, snowflake sweater moment that is in fact so specific that it does that magic thing of flipping lanes over into the timeless, accessing some core of knowledge of what it's like to be a child raging against the total, flaming injustice of it all. Max (Max Records) is an emotional kid, a 9-year-old whose energy and feelings are constantly outpacing both his fearless little body and the people around him, namely an increasingly distant teenage sister and newly divorced mother (Catherine Keener). Allegiances have been broken, and Max responds with confused but insistent attempts to connect, which in this case means trying to connect a snowball to the head of each of his sister's friends when they arrive to pick her up. The friends respond in kind but the game quickly escalates beyond Max; his tears run hot as his sister, with a cool glance before she hops into the waiting car, leaves him bawling on the curb. She's found her new family, and Max is on his own.

Director Spike Jonze infuses this and the following scenes (in which Max trashes his sister's room and is rebuked by his mother when she arrives, exhausted, home from work) with the latchkey loneliness of a certain age. It's a tone easily recognizable by a generation of kids left swinging in the post-divorce breeze, but also to anyone who has seen E.T., another film that addresses the family breakdown and childhood alienation with an allegory about coming to terms with things we don't understand and building strong relationships. E.T. is also another example of that rare thing Where The Wild Things Are wants to be: a film about childhood that is not necessarily a children's movie. Where E.T. made certain concessions to its young audience, Jonze seems more determined to connect adults to existential concepts of childhood; taking Maurice Sendak's brief children's book as its source, Jonze (and co-writer Dave Eggers) are not that interested in entertaining children, and often skirt preciousness in their determination to access/pander to the squishy child lodged inside most adults. It's a risky move for a film that perhaps falls several risks short of brilliance.

Max's immediate world is in chaos. His sister is unreliable, his father AWOL, and his mother, the only adult in the picture, is the picture of helplessness. Curled onto his bed, Max looks at the globe on his bedside table, and we get a shot of the engraved plaque -- a gift from his dad -- affixed to its base: "You're the owner of this world," it reads. But Max can't even own the kitchen. Sent over the edge by the sight of his mom canoodling with a new guy (Mark Ruffalo), Max's tantrum culminated with him sinking his teeth into her shoulders. Keener shouts the ultimate condemnation, one I remember finding both obvious and completely meaningless as a child: "You're out of control!"

Max, snapped into a dingy white wolf costume, goes booking down the block, his mom chasing after. It's a frenzied escape that segues into the imaginary realm, with Max piloting some rough seas in a small boat and winding up on a dark island with a glowing hub high up on one of its hills. He follows the light until he comes upon a sort of commune of giant, fur- and feather-covered monsters, one of whom, it must be said, is totally out of control. Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini, whose heavy, adenoidal breathing has never been put to better use) is trashing their small enclave for kicks; Max, sensing a kindred spirit, steps in to join him, but the monsters are not amused. Huddled around the camera, the monsters' constant gabbling provides a sort of insulation from the imposing figures they cut.

As voiced by Catherine O'Hara (Judith, the hardened fishwife), Forest Whitaker (Ira, the drippy, sad sack husband with the really unfortunate schnoz [Why, Spike, why?]), Paul Dano (Alexander, under-heard, earnest, goat-like), Chris Cooper (Douglas, the chicken-ish sage), and Lauren Ambrose (KW, elusive and sardonic) the monsters are less manifestations of Max than his projections. In them and throughout them (there seems to be a fluid transfer particularly with Carol, who contains elements of Max, his mother, and his absent father) are ideas and behaviors of people he loves but no longer understands. The monsters are malleable, game, stubborn, vulnerable and unpredictable; they are, in other words, just like humans, only bigger, and a little wilder, with an infinite range of beautifully CGI-enhanced expressions. Like most 9-year-old boys, Max is not half the bullshitter he thinks he is, but in this world he quickly convinces the monsters to not only not eat him but make him their king, largely on his platform to "keep out all the sadness" with his sadness shield.

Sadness, as such, is an adult concept, and one the monsters seem to know well. Max wants to help them, but on his own, limited terms, and Jonze has a lot of fun ideating and executing a child's fantasy of complete, romping, rumpus-ing happiness, with giant, pliant pets who do your bidding, seek your favor, and sleep with you in a real pile. They create a giant, hive-like kingdom out of stripling, and Max is indeed the owner of that world -- all is well, for a little while. There are a couple of difficult transitions in the film -- Max's introduction to the group, our first good look at the huge animatronic puppets, thumping around the forest in broad daylight -- but none as unsuccessful as the rift that grows between Max and the monsters, led by Carol and his anger and jealousy issues. "It's hard being a family," is as close as the film gets to explaining the purpose behind the elaborate, chattery, fragile dynamic that gets set up in Max's new world -- the difficulty of human relations proves inescapable even on a human-free island, as Max is confronted not by subjects but autonomous, complex individuals. But the conflict comes before we have a full grasp of the bond, and the bond's dissolution makes sense mainly as an excuse to get Max back where he belongs.

While I don't agree with my viewing companion, who was inclined to dismiss the film as "one long Flaming Lips video," I cede that there's nothing less exhilarating than exhilaration cues, and on several occasions Jonze seems to reach for the childhood-wonder or pathos buttons both too soon and too often. The fluid tone that came so effortlessly to the film's opening scenes proves a little harder to sustain in this alternate world. I suspect fans of the book, of Jonze, and of sublime evocations of childhood will be hard on the director -- who has clearly done his job with maximum heart -- not because he made a bad film but because we wanted a transcendent one so badly.