Movie: Where the Wild Things Are

Starring Max Records, Catherine Keener, James Gandolfini; directed by Spike Jonze

Where the Wild Things Are

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It's a neat trick, taking a book like Where the Wild Things Are, which has about 10 words per page, and turning it into a movie. An exceptionally good movie, at that.

Where the Wild Things Are might be a little too intense for very young children, but for older children – and adults – it works on so many levels.

Director and screenplay writer Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers have taken Maurice Sendak's original story and fleshed it out, giving Max a more complete background, and making him older by about 4 years.

He has an older sister, his mum has a new boyfriend, and Max is feeling lonely and left out.

That loneliness is almost the first thing that comes across on screen, and it's palpable, with the logic of childhood. Max gets excited when his sister and her friends get into a snowball fight with him, but that turns to anger when they destroy his snow fort. Everything is an immediate reaction for Max, and the emotions on screen are raw, and visceral.

After a fight with his mother, Max takes off in a boat, and ends up in the land of the Wild Things. And this is where Jonze's vision for Where the Wild Things Are works best. It's not necessarily a movie for children, but as Jonze himself said, it is a movie about childhood.

The Wild Things are fully realised characters, brought to life on screen by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, giving Max's interactions with them a real sense of life, and wonder. The best of them – and the one Max bonds with most – is Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini (The Sopranos). Carol – like Max – is looking for something, but he doesn't know what it is. He decides that what the Wild Things really need is a king, and Max is right there to fit the bill. After that, as Max says, "let the wild rumpus start!"

Jonze isn't the first director to come to mind for Wild Things, being better known for Being John Malkovich, but the film he's turned out here – a six-year labour of love – is something very special.

- © Fairfax NZ News