WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE: THE YEAR’S MOST MYSTERIOUS MOVIE
by John Marks

(from John’s blog on the Purple State of Mind website)

How to articulate what I felt when I walked out of the theater after seeing Spike Jonze’ Where The Wild Things Are?

Here are a few of the thoughts that passed through my mind.

Is it possible for an astonishing work of art to be completely unsatisfying?

Can something utterly great also be an abject failure?

Where The Wild Things Are is nothing like the book, but then the book is nothing like my memory of reading the book.

Where The Wild Things Are has an undeniably great musical score that escapes the movie and sticks in the mind, but I’m not sure it belonged in the movie in the first place.

Where The Wild Things Are is a hallucinogenic dream pretending to be a story about an unruly child (also true of the book); as a dream, it is surpassing beautiful, as a story, sort of dull.

Where The Wild Things Are is a failed attempt to film the unfilmable that nevertheless captures the essence of what it means to be alive and to know you’re going to have to die.

Where The Wild Things Are is scary in the way that sex is scary and frightening in the way that people are frightening, but it is seldom scary or frightening in the way that movies generally are.

Taken as a whole, the movie is the most frustrating miscarriage of creative vision in recent memory, but seen in three-minute installments, it’s one of the most breathtaking achievements in modern cinema.

The movie changes everything that we know about the medium of popular filmmaking, and yet I feel myself curiously unchanged by the experience of having seen it.

Every so often, as I watched, I felt myself almost fading out, as if what I saw had more reality than I did, as if I were the dream of a character in the movie, and not a spectator watching a product, but when I walked out, the movie slipped away from me like a fleeing, gorgeous impression that barely hangs together in the mind.

Here’s my latest take:

The movie is mysterious in the way that seasons are mysterious. We know why the autumn exists, but when it comes around again, it never fails to take our breath away. It never fails to be out of our reach as an experience. So what if autumn’s textures, colors, odors and evocations are created by the reduction of light and the drop in the temperature? What does that really tell us about the autumn?

That’s roughly how I feel about Where The Wild Things Are. I know it was made by a guy named Spike Jonze, who got a lot of studio money, and was based on a kids’ book that I read as a child, written by a guy named Maurice Sendak and voiced by a very big, heavy-breathing guy named James Gandolfini, among others, but none of that matters.

What matters is that it’s a huge, strange, incomprehensible thing with lots of vast holes and bizarre lights shining through, not unlike a Maurice Sendak storybook creature, crawled into the world to make us feel the ambivalence that lies between wonder and terror, childhood and age, light and darkness. I don’t recommend it to anyone who likes American movies just fine the way they are.