"Where the Wild Things Are" - Monster Therapy

Well, this certainly isn't your little kid's WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. The classic Maurice Sendak tale of a young boy's adventure amidst a colorful collection of sharp-toothed monsters has been turned into a dark and brooding family psychodrama. Instead of a classic children's film for children, filmmaker Spike Jonze delivers a children's film for adults, or rather a grown-up film about childhood that may or may not score well with kids.

It's to Jonze's credit that he manages to create a completely original work of art despite the burden (onus?) of adapting one of the world's best-loved children's stories. Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers succeed in staying true to the spirit of the sliver-thin book while at the same time expanding its themes in ways neither Sendak nor his legions of fans might have ever anticipated.

One thing the movie and the book are in perfect sync about is the fine line for children between fun and fright. The film opens with our young hero Max picking a snowball fight with his older sister's male friends. When these older boys exact their revenge with unexpected ferocity, Max's initial exhilaration dissolves into tears of regret. That experience is repeated (and worked through) in Max's later rumbles with the monsters.

As in the book, Max's fantasy trip to the island of monsters parallels Max's personal issues at home. The monsters are clearly projections of Max's psyche and his interactions with them allow him to resolve many of his frustrations. But Sendak's Max looks to be about 4 or 5 whereas Jonze's Max is more like 9 or 10 ... and in kid years, that's a big, big difference. The book's "young" Max acts up, gets sent to his room, and once there acts out all his aggressions with imaginary monsters who mimic his anger. When the monsters declare him their king, Max calls for the rumpus of all rumpuses and the scary fun begins. Eventually, however, he tires of all this rumpus-ing and returns home to find a warm bowl of soup waiting for him.

The movie's "older" Max has somewhat more complex issues to deal with, both psychologically and philosophically. For instance, a giant, James-Gandolfini-voiced monster points out to Max that his kingdom had started out full of rocks but those rocks had now been degraded to mere sand, and even that sand was now turning into dust. "I don't even know what happens after that," he says bleakly. When Max joins in that he heard the sun will someday burn itself out too, we're closer to existential dread than rumpus-time. If Ingmar Bergman had ever made a children's film, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE could easily have been it.

Even more tellingly, the motherly monster K.W. plays the perfect child psychologist as she asks Max about himself. As he proudly proclaims himself an explorer who travels by sea and air, she interrupts him by pointedly asking if that means he has no home and no family. When he begrudgingly admits to having a family, Max also confesses to having gone a bit crazy and biting one of them. "They think I'm a bad person," Max says. "Well, are you?" K.W. again pointedly asks. "I don't really know," Max candidly responds. This is Monster Therapy at its best.

And to drive home the psychological truths even more clearly, Jonze and Eggers actually have Max literally climb down K.W.'s gullet for temporary protection. When Max is eventually disengorged, he's covered in a kind of goopy filter that is unmistakably a metaphoric amniotic fluid. By movie's end, Max has gone through a re-birth that allows him to rejoin his family with a new appreciation of the complexities of life. That's a conclusion not that far off from Sendak's version of Max's journey - just a little messier. And what a fine mess it is.