Sometimes, I have a Spidey sense for a movie without having seen it in the theater. When it comes out on DVD or Blu-ray, I’ll just buy it, knowing that I will probably enjoy having it in my permanent library. Primer was a good example of that.
So, when Where the Wild Things Are came out, I bought it on Blu-ray, even though I hadn’t seen it before. I had it — I stared at its cover — for several days before popping it into the machine. This is unlike me. Usually, I drop everything I’m doing and start playing that shiny new disc in my collection. But something felt wrong. I knew what that something was before I watched the first frame.
Expectations.
Maurice Sendak’s stories are shrines to being odd. Although I haven’t read one of his books in decades, my intimacy with them is like knowing how to drive stick shift or the difference between right and wrong. Waiting for this story to be told on film was never important to me because it is so specifically tied to the medium in which I first discovered it. Sendak’s artwork, his compositions and shading, his voice, his choice of words and articulation of childhood weirdness are love letters to being misunderstood.
As Spike Jonze’s grim and earnest movie began, I thought, “OK, this is different, not what I expected, and I admire what he’s trying to establish.” But by the time we got to the island, when the monsters are revealed, the movie began to deflate with the force of a pinprick in an overwrought zeppelin. You could hear the hiss as each scene played out artfully, and feel the heartbreaking ordinariness of watching cinema — so limited at times — as it tried to impose a structure, an inescapably linear format, on a story that succeeds precisely because you can linger on an image and impose your own imagination on top of it.
I think Where the Wild Things Are is just misguided. It would be gracious to suggest that Spike Jonze was so rapt by the subject matter that he couldn’t help but get lost in realizing the material. But there’s also a bit of arrogance in the mix. Who does Spike Jonze think he is?
When Max meets the monsters for the first time, the execution of the monsters — the voice actors who suddenly cemented them in a very specific way — robs the viewer of any imaginative involvement in the project. It’s all about Spike Jonze and his monster-makers and the voice actors. Oh, look at how cool her nose is. Oh, look how cool his beak is. Oh, look at their forest and marvel at the rock music in the background as the monsters, like characters in an MTV video, try — with no whimsy or magic — to defy physics during their wild rumpus.
I know this is one of the best-selling children’s books ever, and controversial in its day, but oh, how I wish that a humble filmmaker with a small budget and a true passion for the material had gotten her hands on the material.