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Movie Review: Where the Wild Things Are
4:00 am Oct 8 - by Sarah Gorr – buzz Writer
Six little words reach to the heart of Spike Jonze’s third film, Where the Wild Things Are: “How do I make everyone okay?” This is the question Max asks as he finds himself entangled in the lives of the wild things and struggling with his own life at home. The familiar story, originally penned by Maurice Sendak, has been updated and elaborated, but at its root, it is still the story of a young boy acting out against a grown-up world.
Jonze stated at the Chicago premiere of the film that his intent was “to make a movie about what it feels like to be nine years old in the truest sense possible.” This is exactly what he has achieved. While some may struggle to label Wild Things, unsure whether it’s a clever dramedy or a complex children’s film, it’s wrong to assume that it can’t be both. It’s a film about childhood that doesn’t sentimentalize it and thus strives to recall strong memories in the adults in the audience and surely a sense of empathy in the children. Like Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon reviewed earlier this year, Where the Wild Things Are is that rare breed of film willing to trust that its audience, all kids included, is smart enough to understand; it feels no need to make something hollow simply because of its childhood-centered roots. Everything, from the intelligent and witty screenplay to the genuine performances, works together to create a world both familiar and fantastic, both playful and honest.
The aptly named Max Records plays the lead role of, well, Max. Selected through Jonze’s abstract audition process (Records recalled reading only three lines of script before being asked to do things like run into the backyard and attack his parents with a plastic sword) and chosen over literally a thousand different boys from three continents, Max Records inhabits Max on screen. He seems to radiate innocence and when he scrunches up his face and begins to cry at the destruction of his snow fort, the audience is compelled to empathize, to relive the devastating losses from our own childhood. When he howls with the wild things in recreation of the book’s most famous pages, you too will want to join in.
One of the most crucial and perhaps most brilliantly executed challenges of adapting Where the Wild Things Are for film was the construction of the wild things themselves. A cinematic adaptation had been in the works long before Spike Jonze came along, but it wasn’t until he did that anyone took the possibility of live action seriously. On his determination to keep CGI to a minimum, Spike asked, “Would you rather hug a CG wild thing or a real one?” And looking at the film, it seems to be that simple; as if there could be no other choice. Catherine Keener, who not only plays Max’s mom but also had an integral role in production, agreed saying that had those creatures been CG, “I don’t think we would have cared about them.” Thus, Jim Henson’s Puppet Shop was enlisted to create the bodies, while the CG was reduced to only the faces, creating an emotional realism in such characters that has hardly been seen since Andy Serkis’s performance as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Central to the film’s production, and in part the reasoning behind the casting choices and performances, was the sense of spontaneity Jonze wanted to infuse the film with. He was so insistent upon it that even the voice actors went through some special training to get into what Jonze calls “wild thing mode.” This included taking stars like Chris Cooper, Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini to the park to play dodgeball and Simon Says.
The lengths to which the crew of Where The Wild Things Are went to to represent such a beloved classic of children’s literature are impressive to say the least. Jonze saw Sendak’s book as one of those bold enough to “take the internal lives of kids seriously” and with his own adaptation he has managed to do the same. Where the Wild Things Are is an instant classic lacking in Disney-fied sentimentality and rife with a touching honesty all too infrequently seen.
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