Wild Things! You Make My Heart Sing!

Unless this story has become dislodged from your subconscious since childhood and you've forgotten that Max doesn't get eaten by any Wild Things, then there is only one suspenseful moment in the film version of Maurice Sendak's story. Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are" is hardly a plot-driven movie so there's no need for any spoiler-alerts in this quasi-review of mine. For me, the suspense comes only when the most deeply mournful and mute Wild Thing finally speaks. Shuffling around in the shadows for the whole film and grunting from time to time, the melancholy and rather threatening Bull, seems to stand for the saddest part of the main character, Max. Or, more precisely, for that creature inside all of us. That's what that stuff would look like if it had fur, horns and feet. As the hurt we all carry around but shove into cramped corners and hate to have to look at, he was the scariest Wild Thing of all. But when he speaks, it's not to say what you'd expect.

The film is book-ended by the same two scenes that wrap around Sendak's magical book: wild Max in his wolf suit chasing his small dog around the house at the start and then eating his dinner in the warmth of his home in the end. In the middle is Jonze's intense but playful riff on kids' inner lives. I loved it and so did my 8 year old. His rendition of Sendak's dark childhood fantasy was pitch perfect to my ear. I mean that figuratively, as well as, quite literally. So often, when children's books are translated onto screen, as soon as the characters open their mouths, I cringe. The tone is usually all wrong. The characters' voices are almost always higher-pitched than what I had heard in my head as I read. So off-putting. Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini, as you might imagine, kvetch, demand, moan, chuckle and even snore as Wild Things in voices that are the stuff childhood dreams are made of. Not the dreams that Disney sells. Or the ones you can buy at Toys R Us in a plastic box. Spike Jonze's dreams are the ones that you can't remember clearly in the morning. The ones that leave only a vague feeling behind. You know the ones.

The dreams brought to life in this film include all the old childhood standbys like sleeping all together in complete warmth and safety...and nobody is left out. Except this version takes shape as a fantastical furry pile of overwhelming, chuckling bellies and snorting noses and the king of this hill of love is in minor danger of suffocating to death. And then, there's that old anxiety about not wanting to let any new people in...the new people here being two know-it-all owls named Terry and Bob. These are the kind of dreams where you're a fantastic builder and a destroyer both. A world where you can go around licking people in the face if you feel like it! Where someone will even let you climb inside of them to keep you safe. Even if it is hard to breathe in there. You'll have to see the movie to believe that one.

Jonze never calls these creatures Wild Things in the movie. At least not that I heard. Well, they're not Wild Things to Max and the story is told from Max's perspective. They're his royal subjects and friends. And, as in the book, the film never suggests that Max has fallen asleep when he sails off to the island where the Wild Things are. That's up to you to decide. I saw this movie with my daughter, Lucy who still travels freely between these two worlds: the imaginary and the solid. She saw this film as very straightforward. "Max got in his boat and sailed to the island and came back when he was done and went home."  Of course.

You'll watch this film partly as a kid yourself remembering the story, simple as it was, and thinking, Hey, I think I know what's going to happen next and feeling satisfied when it does. But I also felt it wash over me as a mother. I thought a lot about my 2 boys who are leaving some aspects of very young Max-hood behind. Although, I'm not clear on the status of their wolf-suits. I remember so clearly the surety I felt when each of my children was born that they were perfect and would live to lead charmed lives. Not because I wanted superstar children but because I just couldn't imagine any heartache befalling these perfect vulnerable beings the Universe had bestowed on Henry and me. Too bad for all the other people in the world. These little glowing fragile infants were perfect and would have fairy tale lives. Not rich, not famous, none of that ..... just untouched by suffering. And then came the first cold. The first croup. The first brattiness. The first time they said no and meant it with all their might. Then the first trip to the ER. The first tantrum at the grocery store. The first lie. The first heartache. And it turned out..as it does for every parent who silently promises their child, the moment they lay eyes on them, a life free from suffering...that there is no such thing. No child would be better for it even if there was.

And luckily, it turns out, kids have something much more useful in tow as they set out in life. Something more than any parent could ever promise. Every child carries a whole world around inside them, an inner world that helps in their navigation of this overwhelming outer one. And Jonze lays out Max's interior world in a magically moody way that basically unscrolls as a news flash to big people across the big screen: Hey! It doesn't look like Disneyland inside kid's minds. It's a place where it's all or nothing. Until they learn it's not. It's a pretty tough part of town. It's dark in there sometimes. That's a truth Maurice Sendak understood perfectly and that's why his book had a real edge to it. It wasn't the sweet bedtime pablum so many children's books are. And guess what? Kids loved it. Kids aren't the ones who need the fairy tales. It's the grownups.

I remember vividly the mental landscape of childhood. Even as a 6 or 8 year old kid. Don't you? In between the escape of Saturday morning cartoons and my favorite books, running around with friends and playing with my Barbies, there was more than the occasional stark thought. How did I end up in this family? Are my real parents somewhere else? If I got really good at gymnastics and a bad guy came to the playground at recess I could do backhandspring after backhandspring and kick him in the face and I would be really popular. If I stare at that dot on the ceiling without stopping then daddy won't die bringing the babysitter home. What lives behind the paneling in the rec room? If there's such thing as God, why did he let Nanny die? What's behind me if I don't run up the cellar stairs fast enough? The world looms large to a child. Shadows take different shapes depending on what storms a child is riding out at the time.

Children. We really watch from the outside from the very start, you know. Hoping our love goes with them when they raise the sails and set off in their own small boats to romp with the wild things in their own heads. Because, in the end, it's their world in there. And that's okay. This movie is a lovely reminder of that.