There's going to be an inevitable, vast divide between the lovers and loathers of director Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. Any adaptation of a beloved children's book has its detractors, and when the book is as slim as this one, fleshing it out into a feature-length movie will make leaps with which many viewers simply don't agree. All of that is a roundabout way of saying that, while Where the Wild the Things are is a smart, audacious, visually compelling and often magnificent motion picture, you still might not like it. There's nothing wrong with that, but hopefully you'll give this marvelous film a chance.
This is not a movie for children, although children may enjoy it. Author Maurice Sendak reportedly told Jonze that he would receive his blessing to adapt his picture book, but only if Jonze made it his own, and made it "dangerous." The last thing Sendak wanted was a kiddie movie, and that's definitely not what Jonze made. Working with novelist Dave Eggers, who wrote the screenplay, Jonze has turned Sendak's whisper-thin tale of a rambunctious boy in a wolf suit who escapes to a magical island and turned it into a sophisticated examination of what it's like to be a lonely, energetic child in need of both a creative outlet and a sense of community.
A fractured family lives inside a young boy's mind. Max (newcomer Max Records) finds the community he seeks with Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) a larger-than-life, literally monstrous version of Max's own barely contained id, a lovable, hairy lug with a generous yet destructive spirit, and a lot of control issues. Other members of the island's dysfunctional family are shy, overlooked Alexander (Paul Dano), aggressive, pessimistic Judith (Catherine O'Hara), and KW (Lauren Ambrose), a stand-in for Max's distant teenage sister. The Wild Things represent various emotions, facets and experiences of young Max's life, but Eggers and Jonze avoid creating archetypes that are so on-the-nose as to be clichéd, even while we recognize them as the creations of Max's imagination that they are. The adventures they have are the same as those that Max enjoys in his mundane, normal life -- dirt clod fights, fort-building, tree climbing -- but in this amazing new world where Max is king, everything takes on a larger, grander dimension.
This isn't your usual space-chimp-and-wacky-robot kid's movie. Langorously paced, Where the Wild Things Are may strike some as ponderously slow when compared to the frenetic, in-your-face, constant noise of most children's films. But it's well worth settling in and letting the film take you over. Jonze and Eggers use Sendak's basic story to cannily explore the complications of identity in kids and adults alike, and the difficult journey finding a balance between who we are, who we want to be, and the demands of our inner Wild Things. Surprisingly moving and unexpectedly deep, Where the Wild Things Are is something very special, indeed.