Where the Wild Things Are

by KYW's Bill Wine

What's it feel like to be nine years old? Watch Where the Wild Things Are, then we'll talk.

Where the Wild Things Are is an edgy, fleshed-out, live-action adaptation of the classic 1963 children's storybook by Maurice Sendak. It's unique and it's powerful, and it's marvelous.

It may look like a children's film and sound like a children's film -- and no one's saying that kids cannot see it and enjoy it -- but it's not so much for nine-year-olds as for folks who were once nine themselves and perhaps later raised little ones who became nine at some point.

Interestingly, the slight book has very little in the way of text: it's a picture book, really, with just a handful of sentences.

Working for a committee of producers that includes Sendak and Tom Hanks, the director of Where the Wild Things Are is Spike Jonze, of all auteurs.

With two terrific, idiosyncratic movies -- Being John Malkovich and Adaptation -- on his otherwise music-video-dominated résumé, he's certainly an artistic force to be reckoned with, but his name doesn't come immediately to mind for flicks about kids.

But it was Sendak himself who offered the project to Jonze, who does a terrific, economical job in painting a portrait of family life to set up the film's central conceit.

Mischievous nine-year-old Max (Max Records), a kid with an absentee dad and a distracted older sister, has a longing for intimacy and his share of anger and frustration issues. One day he acts rudely to his struggling single mother (Catherine Keener), who's at home with her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), then storms out of the house.

He hops in a sailboat, and sails away to a mythical, enchanted island, a desolate wilderness inhabited by towering, fearsome, untamed, horned monsters who soon elect him king.

His first proclamation to his new family of untamed creatures (who are socially and psychologically on his level): "Let the wild rumpus start."

But however easy it is to run around in a white wolf suit, it's no easy thing being king. There are all kinds of unresolved tensions among these Wild Things -- which, when you come right down to it, aren't really all that wild -- and Max has to mediate whenever these creatures, serving as metaphors for Max's turbulent emotions, act like children by squabblng and demonstrating some of the same petty problems that Max has seen among the real grownups in his life.

Among the effective puppet-monster voice cast are James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Cooper, and Paul Dano, who comprise a true vocal ensemble while others parade around in the goofy suits.

Just about everything that occurs on the island has a parallel back in the real world, including all the major mood swings. But Jonze doesn't push it. The parallels register, but not in an obvious way.

There have been previous animated versions of Where the Wild Things Are. But Jonze wanted to appeal to a different -- that is, older -- audience than the book's target readers.

And he makes the bold choice of live action, which pays off.

The director stays true to the spirit of the book by depicting the fantasy world without resorting to much in the way of computer-generated effects. Puppetry, with costumes courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, is employed with canny animatronic enhancement and digital animation used to fill out movement and fill in the creatures' facial expressions.

The screenplay, co-written by Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), embellishes Max's adventures and offers both poignancy and emotional resonance as it examines this child's simultaneous desire for security and freedom.

The film has a naturalistic rawness to it, an edge, that's unusual for a movie about children. Perhaps it's too dark for the real young ones. But it never talks down to its audience as it explores childhood and the way depressing reality intrudes on the fun that seems to be nearby but is still out of reach.

That's a heavy load for what is essentially a puppet show. But the balance of imagination and emotion makes for a startling, admirable, and cathartic experience.

Newcomer Records is terrific, a real natural. And Gandolfini, the heart of the film, is just amazing as he reminds us that Tony Soprano is not the only trick in his bag by turning in a voice performance that combines controlled rage and sensitivity and succeeds in bringing his astonishing character to emotionally complex life.

So we'll max out 3½ stars out of 4 for a dark, melancholic, whimsically imaginative but heartfelt fantasy about a child's struggle with reality. The PG-rated Where the Wild Things Are won't be any child's favorite movie, but adults will find the child's play remarkably revealing.

Where the Wild Things Are

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