Accismus

Max (newcomer Max Records, who looks for all the world like Ellen Page) is pissed off. His sister has outgrown him, and, while his mother pays attention to him, is affectionate and always takes his side in things, still, she’s dating a guy, and she has money troubles. So Max runs off into the streets in a temper fit and crawls around in a storm drain, during which cooling-off period he visits the wonderful island of the Wild Things, which every American child will surely recognize from Maurice Sendak’s picture book.

Life on the island is…really, really emo. The Wild Things have got, like, mad conflict, but it’s conflict of the vaguest sort. The type of conflict an author might inject into a story if that author knows plot is traditionally driven by interesting characters with interpersonal “issues,” but isn’t entirely sure what those issues might be about, or what form they might take (hi again, Dave Eggers!). So, we have the main couple of Wild Things – Carol (James Gandolfini) feels abandoned, because KW (Lauren Ambrose) has made new friends and keeps moving away, because she’s really unhappy with Carol, for some reason. And these new friends just really get Carol’s goat…again, for some reason. Meanwhile, the rest of the Wild Things either cower in sulky despair or cynically comment on the inevitability of all this once again turning out poorly (“all this” being the rumpus, a dirt clod fight, building a giant fort). The Wild Things are clearly aspects of Max’s world, but it’s impossible to keep tabs on who represents what. Carol starts out as father figure, then becomes Max, sort of, and KW at first seems to represent Max’s sister, but then becomes very much a mother figure. The other Wild Things seem a little extraneous – there is the tart-tongued skeptic (Catherine O’Hara) and her boyfriend, and the timid one, and one that doesn’t speak until the end, probably because nothing could be thought up for him. You can read whatever you like into any of them. Max seems to like them, most of the time. They kind of like him, except when they don’t, and they sort of like each other, then they don’t. They are by turns threatening and harmless. They have eaten all of the ‘kings’ that came before Max, but for some reason, they are ultimately affectionate toward him.

Apparently, the Wild Things suffer from loneliness and sadness…although, again, why that is isn’t at all clear. All of this nothingness is discussed at length in the vaguest of terms, punctuated by even lengthier weighty, significant pauses, wherein Max and the Wild Things stare deeply into each other’s eyes for seriously about twenty-five-freaking minutes, pondering some point that hasn’t just been made. Then the soundtrack swoops up – Karen O vocalizing in a distractingly jarring way – and everybody runs around and screams for ten minutes or so, until it’s time to have a Very Important Talk again.

Granted, all of this happens against lovely backdrops of landscapes in moody, autumnal colors, but don’t get too attached to the scenery, folks: this world is on its way out. Carol gives Max a tour of the island, and as he points out each dessert and forest, he explains how things used to be lusher, bigger, more reliable. Max repeats a bit of doomsaying earlier imparted by his science teacher, that the sun is dying, which Carol thinks can’t possibly be true. Throughout the whole movie, there’s an overarching tone of ‘well, we’re all just about done here, right?’ As if, whether in real life or in fantasies, whether on Earth or on Max’s island, in familial relationships or community building (or, for that matter, script writing and adaptation), nobody is really even trying anymore. Which is part of what makes this movie seem particularly current – it is a movie that, in my opinion, could only have been made in the late 00’s.

WTWTA has been a long time in coming, partly because Sendak’s book is so thin on plot, dialogue, character and premise. It could be fleshed out in any direction, so long as the basic heart and beloved details are preserved. And so, Eggers and Jonze could have taken this any which way, and they don’t seem to have conclusively picked a definite direction. But the few themes they did settle on – the sun is dying, we can’t talk to each other, we need a ‘king’ to take away the sadness – are telling. The prevailing mood in Max’s world is the prevailing mood in contemporary American letters. This version of WTWTA isn’t interesting as a movie, but it is very interesting as flypaper for the themes in vogue at the present time, and if a screenwriter were to make a version of Sendak’s tale every ten years or so, it would be a cool barometer for seeing where we are and what we’re concerned with.

Apparently right now, it’s environmentalism and personal estrangement. And boredom.