Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are
Classic Children's Book by Maurice Sendak Comes to Life
Nov 1, 2009
There's this romantic image of Spike Jonze as being a man who doesn’t live in the same world the rest of us do and doesn’t see things the same way either. He’s like a grown child, trying to find ways to expand and indulge his imagination at once; living life from the right side of his brain while the rest of us stand around and watch as the man creates one unique and wholly original work after another. He's the kind of person, who, like a child, constantly plays outside of the rules in a place where he can create his own, not to be different or anarchistic or to make any sort of artistic statement but because, simply, that’s just what kids at play tend to do.
Directed by Spike Jonze
It makes sense then that when Jonze began making music videos and commercials and films that he had no formal film training. Rumor has it that when he called “cut” on John Malkovich during a scene from his debut Being John Malkovich that the actor admitted he was getting a little too “Blance”* to which Jonze stared at him blackly before turning around and going back about his business.
Nowhere is that kind of naivety more present in Jonze’s work than in Where the Wild Things Are. That feeling of innocence, detached from any filmic pretentions is what is most charishable about the film. There is no sense of someone standing just off camera, making decisions, framing shots, composing frames, but rather one of complete and utter immersion in which, for an hour and a half, viewer and viewed become interchangeable entities in a singular experience. That’s the brilliance of Spike Jonze: he is not a filmmaker, but rather an orchestrator of unforgettable experiences.
Based on a Book by Maurice Sednak
It’s no surprise then that Jonze would gravitate towards the story of young Max from the beloved children’s book by Maurice Sendak of the same name for his first feature not under the reins of oddball screenwriter virtuoso Charlie Kaufman.
Max is a child or few words and much imagination. He doesn’t have many friends, his sister’s friends are mean to him and his mother, although good intentioned, is far too burdened with work and raising two kids on her own to be much bothered with Max’s wild fantasies such as one in which he constructs a spaceship from the sheets of his bed to blast them off into space before smoldering lava consumes them.
One day a teacher informs his class that the sun could burn out rending the entire world in darkness. Such information is the kind that kids like Max don’t put too much concentration on for if they did, it would surely ruin them.
The Wild Things
Then one night, in a fit of rage against his mother, Max runs off, finds a boat and sails to a mysterious island which is inhabited by giant furry things that are a combination of muppetry and CGI, of all different shapes and sizes. Max is able to convince the things that he is not lunch but in fact a king who once ruled over Vikings for twenty years that were far bigger than they and who has magic ruling powers. Impressed, the things make Max their king, imposing upon him the duty to bring them together and cast out sadness from their world.
Max finds an initial bond with the things because they all share a common feeling of misunderstanding and outsiderness. They all desire to live in a perfect world of friendship and imagination were they can spend their days building vast imaginative forts and playing games, and, in a stroke of genius on the part of Jonze and his screenwriting partner Dave Eggers, they talk in a way that is at once simplistic and innocent and yet so wildly imaginative and abstract that it begins to fall out of reality and into the realms of the poetic.
However, it soon comes, as it must for all children, to Max’s discovery that life is not all about imagination and games and that keeping a family out of strife is a job not a vacation, as the personal bonds between the things (voiced so well by so many wonderful actors who are better left unnamed) break down, and, as expected, Max yearns for home.
The Challenge of Where the Wild Things Are
The challenge of a film like Where the Wild Things Are, so wise about childhood and all its joy and strife, is that it is about an experience; a state of mind, not a conventional narrative and therefore follows no rigid story ark. Jonze is not so much concerned with the points of any plot as much as he is in showing a real place in which magical things happened until the time for them to stop happening came to pass.
That may be a stretch for many families who see the film expecting the sights and sounds and constant aural jolts of what many children’s films have been reduced to these days. However, one can suspect that the film will appeal to those imaginative kids (and adults) who, like Jonze, put their faith in experiencing a journey of discovery while exploring worlds and emotions that they have never encountered before. A story that they can see themselves in.
It’s easy to see how the film, under different hands, could have been a big-budget, bloated endeavor, filled to the brim with special effects and following the tired conventions of a routine plot. But under Jonze’s hands it has the sweet hand-made quality of a labour of love that provides it with, as all the best children’s stories have, a simplicity and innocence that constantly veers over into the touching and the beautiful. It’s not a perfect film, how could it be? But it is an original, magical and unforgettable one.
Rating: 5 out of 5
*Malkovich is of course referring too Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Name Desire and the kind of histrionic acting that such a melodrama requires.
