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Spectacular 'Wild Things' a royal rumpus of fancy

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By NEIL POND American Profile

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 30, 2009

How do you make a full-length movie about a children's story that consists of a mere nine sentences?

Director Spike Jonze tackles that task in "Where The Wild Things Are," which stretches to spectacular, big-screen proportions the soaring, roaring fancy of Maurice Sendak's classic 1963 bedtime tale.

Fresh-faced Max Records plays Max, a precocious 12-year-old with a "wild" imagination. After a spat with his mom one evening, he runs away and ends up on an island populated by large, fantastical beasts.

Max brazenly declares himself the king and leads the wild things in a "royal rumpus," which includes an epic play battle with dirt clods and the construction of an enormous, sprawling fortress out of tree trunks and rocks.

Like Dorothy's trip to Oz, Max's journey is all in his head - isn't it? Jonze brings the story's characters vividly to life with a marvelous combination of looming, lumbering, foam-rubber-suit puppets (with operators inside) and computer-generated wizardry, melding both seamlessly. You really believe, as Max does, in these giant, hairy, feathered and horned beasties, which have distinct personalities, talk in human voices (provided by James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara and Forrest Whitaker, among others) and feel real emotions with which Max can relate.

Jonze, who made his mark directing edgy music videos for the Beastie Boys before transitioning into quirky mainstream movies like "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," has sculpted a splendidly textured visual masterpiece, with poignant, sometimes heavy emotional overtones. The fact that it's based on a children's book might lead you to think it's a kiddie flick, but it's not. It seems intended more for a grownup audience that fondly remembers the story from childhood, not today's generation of multiplex moppets cinematically conditioned to farting hamsters, crime-fighting cartoon canines and other zippy, colorful, quip-firing critters.

In fleshing out the bare bones of the book's sparse narrative, Jonze takes the movie into areas of deep, moody melancholy that will likely not hold the attention of younger viewers. And little eyes may not know how to process the disturbing scenes where one of the wild things brings down two birds by hitting them with stones, or when one wild thing rips off another's appendage in an outburst of temper.

Sendak's book has been beloved for generations because so many kids can relate to Max and his yearning to find a place, real or imaginary, where he can run, romp, scream, make things, break things and belong. Jonze's movie takes that simple idea and pumps it up to something strange, wonderful and weirdly fascinating for anyone who knows - or remembers - what those "wild" longings are like.

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