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Where the Wild Things Are
If you wondered how Jonze and Dave Eggers could expand Maurice Sendak’s nine-sentence children’s book into a feature-length film, you may still be wondering on the way out. This small and underwhelming movie stands to go down as the year’s biggest disappointment, unless that Avatar footage turns out to be representative. The human bookends set the bar high: As the inventor of Jackass, Jonze clearly remembers what it’s like to see the world through preadolescent eyes. When Max (Records) frolics in the snow or peers around the corner at Mom’s new boyfriend (Ruffalo), the film does a remarkable job of showing us only what a child would understand.
But once our pajama’d protagonist ventures WTWTA, it becomes clear there’s not a lot going on. Max meets a motley crew: the James Gandolfini wild thing, the Forest Whitaker wild thing, the Chris Cooper wild thing, the Lauren Ambrose wild thing. It’s admirable that the movie refuses to cheapen Sendak’s vision by inflating it (aside from adding a ho-hum, anti-lying moral), but given the resources involved, the middle section’s reliance on repetitive, storyless forest antics suggests a failure of creativity. (Essentially, this is the world’s longest episode of Fraggle Rock.)
Before we crush your dreams, it needs to be said that the film looks phenomenal—both in terms of cinematography and special effects. (The wild things hail from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, although the faces were computer-manipulated.) Watching these furry friends, you realize certain pleasures are being lost with the digital revolution. But the movie too often feels like a soulless technical exercise, which is about as unchildlike a thing as it could be.
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