WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE review: er, what … ?
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE review: er, what … ?
Dec 03
I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the latest offering from Spike Jonze. It’s simultaneously fascinating and excruciatingly dull; both fun and frustrating; predictable and exuberant. The only advice I can give is that everyone’s reaction to this film will be completely different, depending on their childhood, and where in their lives they find themselves now. I’ll tell you right off the bat that I didn’t really ‘like’ it; it never really wrung any emotions out of me, and I just couldn’t get into it. Now I’ve got that wishy-washy subjective nonsense out of the way, I’ll run you through some technical things that might help inform you of how you might react to this film if you do decide to go and see it.
First off, I’d like to point out that the opening is excellent. Without wanting to spoil the experience, it’s jarring, unexpected, familiar, and serves as a perfect hook to pull you into the rest of the film. After the bravura opening scene we get some cool expository seqences set in protag Max’s everyday life. If you’ve ever been a child, you can probably relate to this nostalgic opening act, even if you didn’t grow up in America and didn’t treat your poor mum like trash.
Then we follow Max as he runs away from home, finds a boat, sails for several days into the horizon, and ends up at a rugged, isolated island in the middle of his imagination. This is where the confusion sets in, and for me, the confusion never really went away. A bunch of well-defined, well-performed wild things are introduced, but Max’s relationship with them is set up in such a way that you know exactly where it will go by the third act. You never know what Max is going to do minute-to-minute, but his character never really changes. He just blunders childlike through a whole bunch of testing situations, and at first this is nostalgic and affecting, but after a while it gets a bit annoying.
The creatures themselves are vividly realised. The full-sized bodysuits are fantastic, and lend a sense of weight and realism that is sorely lacking in many CG-infested blockbusters. Their faces are animated digitally, but the effects are subtle and blend well with the practical effects. Good job, effects teams. The actors behind the characters also do a great job of making these creatures feel outlandish yet familiar, and it’s strangely fun to hear Chris Cooper’s dry, frank voice coming out of a bird’s beak.
That said, the visual and audio landscape are depressingly monochramatic. Visually, everything is brown. The wild things come in varying shades of brown, white and black; they live in a dead, brown forest, and Max wears a brown-dirt-stained grey jumpsuit the whole time he’s on the island. They build a brown fortress with brown rocks and twigs in a brown valley. Even the dawn looks suspiciously brownish. A bit of visual variety would really have helped open this film out, especially after the crips, clean, colourful opening act set in the ‘real’ world.
The musical soundtrack is made up mostly of what I like to call ‘hipster bullshit.’ You know, the kind of self-serious, navel-gazing warbling plaguing hip nightclubs and Twilight soundtracks the world over. There’s only so many times I can sit through twangling (twanging AND jangling) guitar chords and a shrieking female vocalist before I want to leave the room–yet every single freaking song in the film consists of exactly that. It may not stick out so much to you, but to me it diminished the impact of the film. Instead of having some variety, a bit of rollicking fun in the optimistic scenes and a bit of introspective melody in the sad scenes, we get same-same, generic, shallow music the whole way through. Music is vital in a nostalgic film like this, and to drop the ball (into the hands of hipsters, no less) is a big no-no.
Then there’s the problem of target demographic. This film is too slow, boring, scary and weird for children. There were two kids under eight in the theatre with me, and they were crawling over the seats the whole time, eyes never on the screen. It’s more a film for people who remember being kids. But it’s not a retelling of your own childhood, it’s a locked-in recounting of Spike Jonze’s. That’s the feeling that I get–lots of little character moments like Max tugging on his mother’s stockings and the way Max exacts revenge on his apathetic sister, feel a lot like things I wouldn’t think of doing, so therefore must have come from the experiences of someone else–most probably writer / director Jonze. I’m all for wearing your heart on your sleeve and using past experiences in the name of art, but you have to generalise it a little to make sure it hits home, or else gamble on everyone sharing similar experiences as you growing up.
What makes this movie predictable? you ask. Well, two of the wild things in particular: one is a manifestation of Max’s attention-seeking ego, a small goat-like creature who is perpetually ignored by the others; the other is a hulking black bison of a thing who doesn’t utter a word, just glowers dramatically. The minute you meet these two, you know that by the end of the film that a) Max will have approached and listened to the goat thing and given it its vindication, and b) the big black bison thing will speak–once, and once only, at the end. This is so predictable I don’t think I’m spoiling it for you by bringing your attention to it. It’s like watching the movie for the first and second time simultaneously–it doesn’t feel as fresh as it should.
I can’t help but get the feeling that it’s trying to be a bridge between children and their parents–parents get to see the world through a child’s eyes, and the child in the film is forced to make some grown-up decisions, and thereby learns to appreciate his mum a lot more–but it’s too muddled to pull this off.
So you can see I’m in two minds about this film. If you enjoy hipster bullshit and can handle a semi-predictable romp through some kid’s terribly brown imagination, I wholeheartedly recommend it. On the other hand, if the points listed above are likely to annoy you too, maybe hold off till the Blu-Ray is released. Oh, and someone get Spike Jonze a goddamn tripod for Christmas, will you? Felt seasick ten minutes into this movie, and the forced shakiness never goes away–grr!
46/100
