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Let the wild rumpus ... among reviewers and moviegoers ... start.
Is "Where the Wild Things Are" a movie for children or not? If so, how young is too young?
Will they be freaked or creeped out by the 9-foot furry monsters who first appear in the darkness in a wooded thicket dotted with fires? Can you, unlike me, forget that the voice of a creature named Carol, who clings to a makeshift family and has scary flashes of destructive anger, also belongs to James Gandolfini and, of course, Tony Soprano?
- Starring: Max Records, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener.
- Rating: PG-13 for sexual material including some suggestive dialogue, some violence and thematic content.
- Web site: wherethewildthingsare.warnerbros.com/
Forty-six years after Maurice Sendak's book landed on store and library shelves, director Spike Jonze has turned it into a movie. He could have taken the predictable path, following a sort of movie Mapquest with a well-known young actor from TV, the usual suspects for adult voices and traditional computer animation.
Instead, he cast a terrific newcomer named Max Records to play Max, assembled an urbane blend of voices that opts for Chris Cooper and Forest Whitaker instead of Jim Carrey and Robin Williams, and enormous puppets from Jim Henson's Creature Shop that are fleshed out with some computer animation.
Jonze, who directed "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," scores points for wild creativity but forfeits them for losing sight of the younger children who will want to see the movie but may be unsettled or frightened along with thrilled and challenged.
Yes, there is such a thing as being too sophisticated and adult for a PG-rated movie based on a book that sold 10 million-plus copies in this country and is part of countless bedtime rituals.
This "Wild Things" is a bit like "Being Max," with Max a 9-year-old whose parents are divorced. His mother (Catherine Keener) is busy with work and a boyfriend, his older sister ignores him, his science teacher spooks him with talk about the eventual death of the sun and his teenage neighbors wreck his cool snow fort.
After a defiant, angry confrontation with his mother, he races off into the foggy night and sails away to an island where he encounters creatures who first ponder eating him but ultimately crown him king.
Clad in his white wolf costume (closer to cuddly pajamas than scary Halloween outfit), Max howls, boasts about an imaginary sadness shield, hurls dirt clods and grows to understand the complex creatures in his midst and their tangled relationships.
Like Max himself, one struggles to control his ferocious temper and cannot understand why everyone cannot live together, another feels as if no one listens to him and still others are jealous or wary of shifting alliances.
By the time Max must say good-bye to these creatures, we've grown accustomed to their computer-enhanced faces and they no longer are such odious oddballs. One 5-year-old boy at a preview was so upset by the farewell that he started to cry.
The movie starts to meander about half or two-thirds of the way through as the islanders embark on a fanciful, symbolic construction project and the story stalls or starts to seem a bit repetitive.
"Where the Wild Things Are" hinges on young Max Records and he conveys joy, liberation, sadness, pain and an anger that even the character cannot understand with remarkable ease and maturity. He's a find.
In addition to Gandolfini, as the leader of the pack, the wild things include his sometime best friend, the free-spirited KW (Lauren Ambrose); a rooster named Douglas (Cooper); the self-proclaimed downer Judith (Catherine O'Hara) and her companion Ira (Forest Whitaker), who excels in punching holes in anything; and Alexander (Paul Dano), a sensitive, easily hurt goat who pointedly is smaller than the others and often feels dismissed.
The movie is as artistically rendered as Sendak's book, which famously has just 10 sentences, and was spun into a screenplay by Jonze and author Dave Eggers.
The poetic beauty of the cinematography is matched by the Carter Burwell score and songs by Karen O and the Kids. In the end, though, the movie is dark and dense and even the head of Warner Bros. Pictures Group told Entertainment Weekly that parents should take the PG rating seriously. Jeff Robinov called it "a movie for adults first and for a certain kind of child second."
So, like Max, we circle back to where we started. Is your son or daughter or niece or grandson that kind of child? This is not the "Toy Story" double feature.
Parents should be careful if their children typically are scared by fanged creatures or the prospect of a runaway. Children need to be able to sit attentively through a 100-minute movie and it will help to be familiar with the book.
No matter the noble, imaginative intentions, the movie seems to cater to baby boomers, young adults and teens who view the book with nostalgic affection -- instead of the moviegoers who listen to it nightly while wearing their footed pajamas.
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