Perhaps you, like I was, are skeptical of how a movie
Could capture as perfectly as Maurice Sendak's picture book has
Max's wild ride of emotions.
Out-of-control emotions
get him sent to his room without his supper,
and launch him on a journey to the land of the Wild Things
who roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth.
Max looks them in their yellow eyes, tames them,
and becomes their king.
But even then, Max is lonely.
He "wanted to be where someone loved him best of all"
and "gave up being king of where the wild things are."
He goes home to a supper that's still warm.
What you see first in the movie,
is a real live-action boy in a white costume with ears and a tail,
growling loudly as he chases a Scottie down the stairs.
Just as the boy tackles the dog, Spike Jonze does a freeze frame
with the scrawled all-cap letters,
"Where the Wild Things Are."
This Max, played by Max Records (yes, really),
captures the essence of boyhood,
all innocence, charm and mischief rolled into one complex being
(the result of a five-continent casting call).
In the space of several seconds,
his expressions, so natural, so transparent,
register surprise, disappointment, anger.
Everything that happens in the movie
occurs within Max's experience.
Spike Jonze takes a risk
and imagines what sets off Max.
A teacher describes the sun moving ever closer to the earth.
Max's sister, Claire, prefers her phone conversation to a visit to his igloo.
Max starts a snowball fight with Claire's friends,
and they pile onto Max's igloo, crushing it.
His divorced mother invites a date over for dinner.
Max spies frozen corn and jumps up on the table in disgust.
When his mother tries to pick him up and set him down, he bites her shoulder.
"You are out of control!" says his mother (played by Catherine Keener),
as Max flies out the door and down the street
to where his "private boat" awaits.
Spike Jonze takes another risk when he imagines
what those Wild Things might say or do,
beyond the Wild Rumpus.
But Jonze deftly works in echoes of Max's experiences.
The igloo-crushing pile-on becomes a Wild Thing pile-up
that demonstrates their affection and acceptance of Max.
As it was in the book, the journey to the land of the Wild Things
is a transformative experience for Max.
And what a land it is.
The stretches of sand, bounded by endless sea and sky,
give rise to trees that tower over the Wild Things which, in turn, tower over Max.
Nature's palette in this Australian landscape is the same as Sendak's.
When King Max, as his first order of business, shouts,
"Let the Wild Rumpus start!"
the Wild Things step out of the forest of the book
And into the deep dense trees of the big screen.
Carol (James Gandolfini), the striped Wild Thing, is Max's favorite.
Like Max, Carol has constructed an entire imaginary miniature world,
"a place where only the things you want to happen would happen,"
Carol tells Max.
In a tiny boat that sails down the river of this miniature world,
Carol and his beloved red-headed KW are still a couple.
Gandolfini's voice plumbs the depths of emotion
we saw in Tony Soprano--
one moment protective and paternal, the next throwing childlike tantrums.
When Max cannot bring KW back into the fold
("You were supposed to take care of us! You promised!"),
Carol wants a new king.
As Max sets sail for home,
the Wild Things join in a group howl.
Only KW says, the way a mother might say it to her child,
"I'll eat you up I love you so."
Max's reunion with his mother is wordless.
Their expressions exude ineffable gratitude and relief.
Like John Cassavetes, Jonze trusts his actors
to say everything that need be said
Solely through the expressions on their faces.
Max has appeared in a book again only once,
a reissue of Ruth Krauss's 1948 text Bears (HarperCollins/di Capua, 2005).
Ruth Krauss and her husband, Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon),
whom everyone called Dave,
mentored Sendak throughout his early career.
On weekends, he visited them in their Connecticut home
with the manuscript for Wild Things.
"Dave gave me the word 'rumpus,'" Sendak said in an interview
(Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2005)
"Max was like our child."
Would Sendak entrust Max to just anyone?"
Here's to Spike Jonze,
who has shepherded Max to the big screen
and safely home again.
--Jennifer M. Brown
Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (Cinco Puntos Press/Consortium, $16.95, 9781933693583/1933693584, September 2009)