Where the Wild Things Are

City Paper Grade: A-

by Shaun Brady

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: James Gandolfini voices Carol, Max's (Max Records) counterpart in Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are.

[ City Paper Grade: A- ]

The text of Maurice Sendak's classic Where the Wild Things Are is barely longer than this review, yet it's as incisive a children's book as has ever been written. The major hurdle facing Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers in adapting it, then, was in expanding the source material without bloating its miniature precision. They handle this by essentially burning out Sendak's riotous spree during the early going, then settling into this world and spinning gentle variations on the author's central theme.

The original was all about the untrammeled ferocity of childhood, the way that every stricture imposed by an authority figure inspires reveries of escape and freedom. In Jonze's film, that territory has already been covered before Max (the wonderfully vivid Max Records) even dons his wolf suit; a few brief scenes sketching out his home life picture the rage and remorse with which he deals with his loved ones and their degrees of absence — the sister who seems to be maturing away from him, the threat of his mother's new boyfriend, and unmentioned but looming in the shadows, the missing father. That cycle was the entirety of Sendak's book, which climaxed with the Wild Rumpus; that scene happens barely a third of the way through the film, leaving Max in a world full of unleashed id, where the only thing left to do is to grant each Wild Thing its turn on the couch.

As Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), Max's closest analogue among the Things, points out, this is meant to be "a place where only the things you want to happen will happen," but the imaginary landscape, which at first is joy and menace in equal measure, soon levels into melancholy. It's a dark interpretation, one fueled by the unfulfilled promise of imagination, where the impregnable fortress you see in your mind's eye is an easily crushable snow fort to the older boy down the road.

Read Lauren F. Friedman's feature on Where the Wild Things Are.