Where The Wild Things Are
From the very beginning, with a quiet, lilting acoustic and the child-like graffitti scribed across the company logos in the opening credits, Spike Jonze immediately puts you in mind of every independent feelgood picture you have watched. Max (played by 'yes-that's-his-real-name' Max Records) is seen playing in the drifts of snow outside his front yard in the height of winter in a none too trend-setting anorak. Dulled, washed out visuals aided by an authentic feeling shaky-cam all add to the flavour of a well considered opening.
The eminently likeable but persistently tiresome Max is bored and lets off steam by hurtling around his house, chasing his dog and having snowball fights, but also has the beautiful moments of calm that all parents love when he sits reading a book or makes a solitary snow shelter to lie in, minding his own business, no doubt wondering about the wonderful world of possibilities and imagination that only boundless youth and optimism can contemplate.
Visually, at least, we can relax as the movie counterparts are beautifully designed and whilst like every book you have ever read that has been adapted into a film, you fear for it before you see it, this much nail-biting was unwarranted.
The same cannot be said for the wild things that previously didn't have a voice. To hear the things speaking in american accents (most notably what sounds to english ears like an overweight pizza loving Italian/American New York yellow cab driver) sounds completely wrong. Without clearly thinking too much about beforehand, I realised I had always imagined the Things to be eastern european in origin. Maybe Slovaks or at the very least heralding from the Baltics or even Northern Russia. The choice to make them American seems entirely alien to me and I'm sure many others. In order to avoid the Muppet/Fraggle Rock simile, it would have been a better idea to steer well clear of any american overtones altogether. However, that is just a personal grumble.
All of this dewy-eyed loveliness and ebullient enthusiasm can't last long and when his tired mother shouts at him for standing on the kitchen table, things get out of hand, with Max biting her and running off into the night. With his mother in hot pursuit he rushes through the streets and into the forest, down grassy banks, finding his way almost inevitably to the riverside, where he finds a boat sitting idly by with it's sails just waiting to be raised.
And so there begins Maurice Sendak's original tale on which the film is based. The childrens book is a massive global success of which I am also a fan, having read the book to all of my own children many times over just the last decade.
When I first heard Jonze was making this picture, I no doubt thought the same thing every other movie loving grown up did. How do you make a movie out of that? It is only a couple of hundred words long and without doubt, largely dependent on it's visual charms, which would be seriously difficult to reproduce without coming off as cheesy or, god-forbid, even Muppet-like.
Jonze, if we're brutally honest is really on a hiding to nothing here and you have to wonder when he thought all of this extraneous material added to a well-loved story that was deliberately and successfully scant on detail was ever going to work sufficiently well enough to engage an audience already familiar with the original work. Frankly, this really needs to distance itself from the written work and try standing in it's own right, which of course it has no realistic chance of doing given the source material and Jonze's admirable but ultimately foolhardy decision to be so true to the characters, such as they were.
Taken out of adaptation, because you simply must in order to not lambast the shortcomings of the film, then this is a pleasant, sometimes raucous, hour and a half that never so much as blows the mind, but is warm and fuzzy enough to gladden the heart in the same way the book did, and that is probably the greatest compliment I can give it.
In the cold light of day, you have to suggest that less is more with 'Wild Things' and here we have more whether we like it or not. Those who haven't read the book and still decided to see the film (there must be someone out there that this applies to) will no doubt find this enchanting and more than a little bewildering, but no less enjoyable for that fact. For everyone else, it's a shame that he didn't leave it well alone. Thankfully however, I don't think his efforts, however well intentioned they may have been, will affect the love for the original work.
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