Mild Thing

Will there be a bigger disappointment for me this year than Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are? Gosh, I hope not: I’m not sure my heart could take it. My heart was seeking something rowdy and fierce, like the miniature hero of Things, Max. But unlike Max, my heart was prepared for something even more dangerous, something that would genuinely scare me or move me or startle me. And I didn’t get that.

Now, I don’t want to undersell Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, because it is very faithful to the letter and the spirit and the look of the original story. And that means that even today — when children’s emotions and quirks are doused with Ritalin — Max (played with heated fury by Max Records) is allowed to be the Max he was in the 1960s: adventurous, roaming, free-spirited, angry. It’s a portrait that some adults may find uncomfortable. But I suspect children will embrace it.

Max runs fuming away from home and his mother (Catherine Keener), who’s frustrated with her son’s temper. There’s a lovely unexplained fantasy about how Max travels — days and nights by sail — to a distant island inhabited only by monsters who might eat him or might make him their king.

Jonze, who adapted Sendak’s book with Dave Eggers, is wonderfully free of any compulsion to make the story make “sense.” The freewheeling imagination at play here echoes that of the book, and the monsters — unexpectedly voiced by the likes of James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Forest Whitaker, and Paul Dano — are, like Max, expressive combinations of unruly sentiment and passion. They’re all id, and the blend of puppetry and CGI that animates them is a beautiful example of the power of film. I’d be thrilled to introduce any child to it.

But maybe it’s because I no longer have a child’s sensitivity that the film failed to reach me, as an adult. Or maybe it’s because my expectations for Jonze were so high: Though he’s made only two feature films prior to this, 1999’s Being John Malkovich and 2002’s Adaptation, they are two of the most strikingly original movies ever made. I feel like I’ve already seen his Where the Wild Things Are already ... and I have: in the Sendak book.

Wild Things is very much itself, confident and certain. It’s no more and no less than what it needs to be, if the goal were merely to transfer Sendak to the big screen. Being a faithful adaptation isn’t a bad thing to be, not at all. I guess I’m just a tad surprised that Jonze was happy to subsume his vision to someone else’s. It’s not what he’s taught us to demand of him, and this grownup wild thing is saddened to see him tamed.