Movie Review: Where the Wild Things Are

THREE THINGS I LIKED:

1. THE OPENING MOMENTS — Spike Jonze begins Wild Things with roughly 10-15 minutes of handheld footage of his isolationist young star (Max Records) wreaking havoc. Max gets into a snowball fight that leads to his prized "igloo" being destroyed and then disrupts his divorced mother (Catherine Keener) with demands for dinner while she is trying to spend some quite time with her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo). I won't make any grand predictions about what the future holds for Records, but as far as this film goes,  he mercifully displays none of the typically dreadful child-actor affectations.
2. AN ARTIST'S TOUCH — There undoubtedly those who would argue Maurice Sendak's 1963 Caldecott Medal-winner is something too sacred to be adapted for the big screen. Considering that the 338-word book didn't even run 40 pages, it may indeed have been better-suited for a short film. Regardless of any flaws, Jonze's live-action version of Wild Things is ultimately well-intended and far more sincere to its origin than most recent Hollywood attempts at children's classics (example springing to mind: "If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more."). 
3. THE ACTUAL WILD THINGS LOOK GREAT ... — Most everything in the movie looks great (there's equally ambitious production design and cinematography), but the right combination of giant puppetry and CGI makes the monsters really quite stunning.

THREE THINGS I DIDN'T:

1. ... ALTHOUGH THEY COULD'VE BEEN A BIT MORE "WILD" — We're given a variety of voices (James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper and Paul Dano) and ultimately a variety of problems—too many problems, actually. Did I call them monsters a second ago? I don't know that they're scary in the traditional sense, but it's accurate if you find dysfunctional families voicing their resentments to be frightening.
2. NOBODY LIKES STRETCH MARKS — I understand that those are bound to be somewhat evident when you're basing a script on a work that's just 10 sentences long, but there's multiple points where Wild Things feels as though it's without any real conflict and just sort of meandering. The dialogue between Max and the Wild Things touches on personal relationships and reaches for a larger context, but much of it ends up being forgettable and feeling like filler. 
3. UM ... SO WHAT REALLY WAS THE POINT OF THAT? — I would've thought that transforming a bedtime story into something like a thesis would result in a perhaps a more profound or significant view of the tale. Instead I was just sort of left thinking, "Well, that was cute."

25 WORDS OR LESS:

The film version will neither usurp nor diminish the legacy of the book.