Roam if you want to
Wild Things celebrates humankind’s quest for adventure
By Erik Hayden 10/22/2009
Where the Wild Things Are
Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring: Max Records
Rated PG for mild thematic elements, some adventure action and brief language
1 hr. 34 min.
You are a 10-year-old boy, an explorer dressed in an animal costume who sets out on a sailboat in search of adventure, freedom and a world apart from your family. After a day and night of sailing, you see the distant glow of firelight on the horizon. By chance, you have discovered Peter Pan’s Neverland — an untouched paradise filled with heavily wooded forests, Sahara-like sand dunes and high cliffs overlooking an endless windswept ocean.
Soon you discover the Lost Boys (the Wild Things), they are directionless without their leader, their king, their Peter Pan. They are a little suspicious of you at first. You are at least five feet shorter than any of them and seem very young to be a king. But you stand tall and wave these suspicions away with stories of valor — you’re a great explorer who’s conquered Vikings and has great powers like making people’s heads explode.
This convinces them, and in no time, you are given a dull gold crown that means you are a king — King Max. “Let the wild rumpus start!” you whoop. Your friends immediately get to work on building the grand fort with secret underground passageways and lookout points. Later you’ll romp around the forest, slide down sand dunes and have a dirt clod fight.
If this sounds like a child’s fantasy, well, it is. It’s also a familiar one, lovingly read to children before bedtime since 1963. And luckily, Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are loses none of the youthful exuberance, excitement, fear and, of course, adventure of the original classic. The film takes those hand-drawn pictures and painstakingly brings them to life, populating the “Neverland” where the wild things roam with living, breathing and surprisingly soulful, furry giants whose history and intentions always remain mysteriously elusive.
Not that King Max seems to notice. His primary concern is to have fun and experience the thrill of exploring and navigating the rugged, pristine world surrounding him. After all, it’s better than staying at home where his teenage sister ignores him, his mother is busy dating, and those older boys crushed his igloo snow fort. If finding paradise is what running away brings him, why not stay there forever?
But every Neverland has to have a Captain Hook. For Max and the Wild Things, it’s even more complicated. With no bad guys to fight against, this ragtag group turns on itself, sometimes even violently. Its reasons for squabbling and eventually, fracturing apart, are varied, convoluted and even non-sensical. In other words, Max and the Wild Things treat each other like a real-life family.
It seems that this fantasy, just like reality, is subject to the same laws of human nature and interaction. Loneliness and rejection are the natural result of the group’s endeavors. Despite Max’s best intentions to learn to be attentive to all of his “subjects’ ” needs, he still takes pleasure when flurries of dirt clods are thrown at the poor goat-like wild thing after the day’s game is long over.
Nevertheless, the film does its best to avoid typical children’s movie conventions, especially heavy-handed moralizing. Instead it revels in childlike wonder at the ideal of adventure — living freely, roaming an untamed world, chock-full of possibilities.
Where the Wild Things Are will be many things to many people. For some parents, it will be that bizarre children’s movie they toted the toddlers to. For the Urban Outfitter’s teen-set, it will be a renewed rallying cry to stay young, not conform, and purchase a “Wild Things” branded T-shirt. For some over-analytical adults, it might be a cynical, existential treatise on the nothingness surrounding human pursuits. But for most, the film will simply be good fun.
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