Where the Wild Things Are

Break­ing through in the fabled film­mak­ing class of ​’99, Spike Jonze did every­thing but dress up in a wolf suit to prove that he was an orig­i­nal Wild Thing. Forged in the fires of gonzo pub­lish­ing, skate and music videos, Jonze reflect­ed a new Amer­i­can aes­thet­ic that com­bined reck­less brava­do and youth­ful ener­gy with an instinc­tive feel for the fer­al pow­er of film.

Being John Malkovich emerged ful­ly formed from the Siamese brain space of Jonze and screen­writer Char­lie Kauf­man. Elec­tric and elu­sive, with it Jonze grad­u­at­ed from the MTV gun­slinger behind Björk and the Beast­ie Boys, merg­ing the sen­si­bil­i­ties of ​‘seri­ous’ moviemak­ing with style-con­scious mod­ernism and intel­lec­tu­al swag­ger. Three years lat­er, Jonze and Kauf­man pro­duced Adap­ta­tion., whose nar­ra­tive pyrotech­nics dyna­mit­ed the final, brit­tle bound­aries of con­ven­tion­al film­mak­ing. But that was then. Sev­en years have passed. Sev­en years in which the class of ​’99 – the likes of Wes Ander­son, Sofia Cop­po­la, David Finch­er and PT Ander­son – have evolved in their dif­fer­ent ways. But while his con­tem­po­raries have suf­fered their slings and arrows, Jonze has been curi­ous­ly silent.

It was in that silence that an adap­ta­tion of Mau­rice Sendak’s ​‘Where The Wild Things Are’ ges­tat­ed. The sto­ry of Max, a young boy sent to his bed­room with no sup­per who jour­neys across the sea to the land of the Wild Things, it was pub­lished in 1963, earned a Calde­cott Medal and has since tak­en up res­i­dence in any list of the best sell­ing kids books of all time. The book has been cir­cled by a suc­ces­sion of film­mak­ers tempt­ed not just by its high pro­file but by the rich pos­si­bil­i­ties for trans­la­tion to the screen. Until now, the story’s econ­o­my and matu­ri­ty have defeat­ed them all, but giv­en the child­like qual­i­ties evi­dent in Jonze’s elas­tic cin­e­mat­ic worlds, it seems like the mate­r­i­al has final­ly fall­en into the hands of the per­fect director.

When fol­low­ing Max’s harum-scarum flight from home, or the wild rum­pus in the woods, pro­pelled by Karen O’s exhil­a­rat­ing sound­track, the film lodges itself in some post-con­scious part of the brain and sends out pure bolts of cin­e­mat­ic bliss. Sendak cer­tain­ly thinks so – giv­ing his bless­ing to the project for the first time. And why wouldn’t he? Look­ing back at Jonze’s pre­vi­ous films, there are the­mat­ic par­al­lels between the work of the two men. Sendak intend­ed his Wild Things to serve not just as tra­di­tion­al car­toon mon­sters but as phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions of Max’s emotions.

Pub­lished two years after the death of Carl Jung, it’s no coin­ci­dence that Where The Wild Things Are brings the realm of the uncon­scious to life. For Sendak, it was also a form of art ther­a­py – anoth­er Jun­gian con­ceit – capa­ble of express­ing the feel­ings of trau­ma and alien­ation that haunt­ed him in secret for most of his life. Jonze, along­side Char­lie Kauf­man, has also fix­at­ed on visu­al­is­ing the uncon­scious. Whether get­ting into the lit­er­al head space of a famous actor in Being John Malkovich, or phys­i­cal­ly drama­tis­ing the mul­ti-lay­ered per­son­al­i­ty of a screen­writer in Adap­ta­tion., he’s been able to bring a feath­er-light pop-cul­tur­al pre­science to Kaufman’s com­plex philo­soph­i­cal psychoses.

So here we are, five years lat­er, breath-bat­ed and fever­ish with antic­i­pa­tion. Because this isn’t the usu­al Spike Jonze joint. Whether casu­al­ly rein­vent­ing the pop pro­mo, mak­ing sly­ly sub­ver­sive ads or quick­en­ing Hollywood’s pulse, Jonze has always made it look easy. He stole out of left­field, spend­ing cre­ative cap­i­tal rather than stu­dio cash. He made films with tight-knit crews and guer­ril­la ener­gy. He was quick and sharp and spon­ta­neous. What hap­pens when you bring that film­mak­er into the stu­dio sys­tem, where the answer to any ques­tion is count­ed in dol­lars (sev­en­ty mil­lion of them in this case)? What hap­pens when he’s in charge of pro­duc­tion with a crew of over 400 peo­ple, where every shot must be painstak­ing­ly mapped out over a series of months? What hap­pens when he answers to five pro­duc­ers, four exec­u­tive pro­duc­ers and three sep­a­rate film units?

The answer, per­haps inevitably, isn’t straight­for­ward. Because for all that Where The Wild Things Are is redo­lent of the exu­ber­ance, love, fear and loathing of child­hood, it is also an unwieldy, con­flict­ed, awk­ward teenag­er of a film. It’s a film of occa­sion­al­ly tran­scen­dent highs that nev­er­the­less cre­ates ici­cles of dis­ap­point­ment in the gut. It’s a film that you’ll des­per­ate­ly, des­per­ate­ly want to love. But won’t.

At its best Jonze’s film locates with­in the dark heart of child­hood a nest­ing place of lone­li­ness and con­fu­sion. Max – bril­liant­ly played by Max Records as a com­bi­na­tion of bois­ter­ous free spirit­ed­ness and fear­ful intro­spec­tion – is a child on the cusp of change. His sin­gle moth­er (Cather­ine Keen­er) has a new boyfriend, while his sis­ter is drift­ing away from him into ado­les­cence. Left alone, he’s gripped by sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety and a sense of betray­al. At school, he learns that one day the sun will die too, and as this ulti­mate cos­mic aban­don­ment takes shape in Max’s frag­ile sense of real­i­ty, his para­noia morphs into exis­ten­tial dread. In oth­er words, he dons a wolf cos­tume, bites his mum and runs away.

In a tran­si­tion sig­ni­fied by a shift in light and tex­ture, Max is trans­ferred to the land of the Wild Things – giant crea­tures caught in a pri­mal cycle of cre­ation and destruc­tion, the embod­i­ment of a nine-year-old’s often-vio­lent world­view. A com­bi­na­tion of pup­petry, per­for­mance and CGI, the Wild Things are a tech­ni­cal mar­vel. Designed by artist Son­ny Gerasi­mow­icz, they were con­struct­ed by Jim Henson’s Crea­ture Shop in LA while the voice actors spent two weeks per­form­ing a live stage ver­sion of the script. Pup­pet actors then worked the suits on set in Aus­tralia before CGI fea­tures were over­laid to add an extra lay­er of expressiveness.

The final effect is an ele­gant assem­bly of engi­neer­ing and art – the Wild Things of Sendak’s draw­ings finessed by the imag­i­na­tion of Jonze and the hard work of actors and experts. Their very weight and phys­i­cal­i­ty prove cru­cial to the emo­tion­al res­o­nance that makes the sto­ry tick. They run and leap and fight and howl with a men­ac­ing but para­dox­i­cal­ly oth­er­world­ly ​‘real­ness’, with a his­to­ry writ­ten into their bod­ies in snapped toe­nails, gouged horns and crust­ed fur.

Jonze and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Lance Acord shoot them in nat­ur­al light, reflect­ing the fact that child­hood isn’t the pri­ma­ry-coloured par­adise of Dis­ney, but a world of hazy sun­light and hid­den shad­ows. Fur­ther nat­u­ral­is­ing the Wild Things with­in their sur­round­ings, it’s Max’s trou­bled and unsat­is­fac­to­ry home life that begins to look like the fan­ta­sy world.

There is also, per­haps, in this her­met­ic king­dom of the imag­i­na­tion a com­ment on film­mak­ing itself. Max and the Wild Things build a fort – anoth­er phys­i­cal sym­bol of their inner feel­ings – where ​‘only the things that you want to hap­pen, hap­pen.’ But as that fort is metaphor­i­cal­ly and lit­er­al­ly destroyed from with­in by a pet­ty pro­ces­sion of lies, com­pro­mis­es and dis­ap­point­ments, it’s hard not to see it as an unwit­ting reflec­tion of the film­mak­ing process.

Just like the Wild Things them­selves, Sendak’s book was look­ing for a king and in Spike Jonze it found the wildest one of all. But even that ulti­mate­ly hasn’t proved enough to off­set five years of frus­tra­tions, stu­dio argu­ments, tech­ni­cal hitch­es and dis­as­trous test screen­ings. Because at the same time that Jonze lifts us out of the com­fort zone of tra­di­tion­al kids films, a nag­ging sense of famil­iar­i­ty keeps us ground­ed. The film’s ten­sion between domes­tic­i­ty and wild­ness is nev­er con­vinc­ing­ly resolved. Instead, the rela­tion­ships among the Wild Things are played out as a series of almost sit-com­ic arche­types in which the ​‘Wife’, the ​‘Hus­band’, the ​‘Lon­er’, the ​‘Seri­ous One’ and so on trade improb­a­bly ran­dom snip­pets of dia­logue like a child’s eye par­o­dy of a soap opera.

No doubt this is part of Jonze’s com­mit­ment both to the spir­it and the log­ic of child­hood where life is more eas­i­ly viewed as a series of non-sequiturs and fleet­ing thoughts, but the cumu­la­tive effect is of nar­ra­tive threads slow­ly unrav­el­ling. That very sense of slow dis­in­te­gra­tion is telling, because the film has only two speeds: flat out and dead stop. When fol­low­ing Max’s harum-scarum flight from home, or the wild rum­pus in the woods, pro­pelled by Karen O’s exhil­a­rat­ing sound­track, the film lodges itself in some post-con­scious part of the brain and sends out pure bolts of cin­e­mat­ic bliss. These are the scenes in which you can feel Jonze behind the cam­era chan­nelling his enthu­si­asm through the screen. But when it’s not doing that, Where The Wild Things Are grinds to a halt and the spot­light is shift­ed onto a script that can’t bear the scrutiny.

Unmoored from the dynam­ic abstruse­ness of Char­lie Kauf­man, some of Jonze’s choic­es seem wil­ful­ly odd. Addi­tions to the book include a giant dog and talk­ing owls. Why? Well, this is a child’s world – the why is irrel­e­vant. But this is also a piece of cin­e­ma with cer­tain styl­is­tic and nar­ra­tive demands, ones that Jonze is unwill­ing to meet.

The fact that the film is co-script­ed by Dave Eggers adds an extra fris­son. His first nov­el, ​‘A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius’, detailed the emo­tion­al fall-out from the death of his par­ents, and the enforced and painful peri­od of grow­ing up that fol­lowed. But while Eggers’ fin­ger­prints may be on the film’s more ten­der scenes in which Max and his moth­er share a qui­et and con­vinc­ing bond, he isn’t able to bal­ance Jonze’s flights of fan­cy with the screen­writ­ing rigour that Kauf­man under­stands instinctively.

Grad­u­al­ly, Max will realise that life is a state of change – that all good things come to an end, and some­times what’s fun isn’t what’s right. Nei­ther Sendak nor Jonze shy away from the uncom­fort­able truth that child­hood is a time of inse­cu­ri­ty and cru­el­ty; when we lash out in our con­fu­sion at the world and insist – against all the evi­dence of our igno­rance and feck­less­ness – that it should treat us as its king. It is, to use that mad­den­ing, eva­sive but ulti­mate­ly accu­rate phrase from adult­hood, ​‘com­pli­cat­ed’.

And the same is true for Jonze. Where The Wild Things Are is com­pli­cat­ed. It moves smooth­ly from the sub­lime to the ridicu­lous, it inhab­its the dual worlds of fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty, and artic­u­lates some­thing pro­found­ly sim­ple about both. But what’s fun isn’t always what’s right. Like the trees in the Wild Things’ for­est, there’s a hole in the heart of this film – some­thing miss­ing that can’t quite be cov­ered by all the indus­try and artistry that five long years could muster.

It’s the spark of inspi­ra­tion, the easy charm and reck­less brava­do of Jonze’s ear­li­er work. This may be his most ambi­tious film ever but it’s a hard one to go wild for.