30 for 30 — 2009: "Where the Wild Things Are"
"He's just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king."
What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 2009. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
A lot of movies picture kids as quaint, precocious, angelic beings. Hardly any really lean into how absolutely mean, feral and primal they actually are before they figure out the world doesn’t revolve around them. Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s picture book “Where the Wild Things Are” is one of the few exceptions.
This sparse movie expands Sendak’s thin book to give main character Max a little bit of a backstory as to why he yelled at his mother that he wanted to eat her. His parents are divorced. His older sister ignores him. He’s a young preteen just starting to learn more about the world around him — a recent science class lesson about how the sun will eventually die worries him a great deal.
He’s young enough to still imagine great big fantasies for the lava fort he’s built in his room. He’s old enough to know that he’s angry, but doesn’t have the vocabulary to express why he’s feeling so angry. He desperately wants to control his own world but doesn’t have the faintest idea as to what that entails.
We only spend about 20 minutes in the real world with Max, as Jonze shoots the whole world through a child’s eyes, with all the imagination, wonder and terror that entails. By the time he yells at his mom, we’re off to the land of his imagination, a place where “only the things you want to happen, would happen.”
While there, he meets the Wild Things, all performed by a combination of actors in puppets and CGI: The creative, hot-tempered and impulsive Carol (James Gandolfini), the calm, gentle KW (Lauren Ambrose), wise, passive, people-pleasing Douglas (Chris Cooper), soft-spoken, kind Ira (Forest Whitaker), the aggressive, loud Judith (Catherine O’Hara), the depressed, quiet, diminutive Alexander (Paul Dano), the mute Bull (Michael Berry Jr.) and the unintelligible owls Bob and Terry (Jonze). The Wild Things soon declare Max their king, and start a Wild Rumpus, and believe everything will be all right.
It doesn’t take an expert in psychology to realize that each of the Wild Things represents different parts of Max’s personality or people in Max’s life. And it’s no wonder Max most closely identifies with Carol, the brashest, most creative Wild Thing of the group. The movie unfolds like what a kid would think is the coolest playdate of all time — you are in charge of your own little kingdom, everyone does what you tell them, you can build whatever you want, the world is your oyster. But there is a dark undercurrent flowing just under the surface of this idyllic land that comes to the forefront once things start to go wrong. Plans for the Wild Things’ ultimate fort change. New members are brought into the group. Infighting starts. Max slowly realizes that even here, he can’t be the center of the universe, and that ruling things comes with more responsibility than he had thought. He reveals to the Wild Things that he isn’t really a king. And then he goes home, presumably to apologize to his mom. Cut to credits.
This movie opened me up to new ideas about what an adaptation could be (coincidentally, from the director of “Adaptation.”) when I first saw it. Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers took a slender picture book and turned it into a movie that looks like it’s for kids, but it’s really for adults. I do think this film’s message is important for kids: The overwhelming emotions you feel when you feel like nobody understands you are important to get through childhood and are not bad in and of themselves. They can become detrimental to you if you don’t start to let them go as you get older and realize the world is bigger than your own little fiefdom. But the movie takes its time, and I don’t know if the target audience from the book could sit still through the movie.
Watching this movie again as an adult floored me, though. This is a beautiful-looking film with some great puppetry techniques and shooting locations on display, with a primal score from Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It also made me remember Little Jake, who used to come up with crazy Lego building ideas and wild stories, who had a lot of emotions going on under the surface but didn’t know why. I’ve had a lot of discussions lately about when I allow myself to feel feelings and why, and this movie was cathartic in ways that I didn’t expect. It allowed me to name some of those feelings and realize it’s not good to bottle things up, but it’s also not healthy to spew your emotions everywhere either.
But most of all, it reminded me that we’ve all got those Wild Things living in our heads, and it’s good to revisit them every once in a while.
Up next: 2010’s prophetic “The Social Network.”
Letter of Recommendation
If you haven’t read Maurice Sendak’s original book in a long time, I recommend the audio version read by Christopher Walken, who adds his own commentary in the margins:
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