I went to the movies with my son yesterday--we saw Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's interpretation of the book by Maurice Sendak. I don't know what I expected from the film, exactly, but what I took from it was much different (and much more profound) than anything I could have anticipated.
People who haven't liked the film, as far as I can tell, went in expecting a lighthearted adventure fantasy. I'm not sure why anyone would expect that--at least, not anyone who's read the book. The monsters in Sendak's story were enormous, scary creatures who gnashed their teeth and bared their claws and rolled their eyes. They were the creation of an angry little boy, Max, who'd been sent to his room for misbehaving. Why would they be cuddly, fun-loving friends? Max isn't looking for someone to play with; he's looking for a place where he can finally call the shots. That can't happen in the human world, where big people boss the little people around, so it has to happen in an imaginary world where small people rule. And the occupants of that world might as well be big and scary, to illustrate just how powerful the small people are.
The film version of this story deals more with the psychology of Max's experience (and of being a child, in general) than with monsters or wild rumpus. The movie begins with several scenes of Max acting like a boy of eight or nine--first chasing his dog, then building a snow fort of which he's particularly proud, then trying to get his big sister Claire's attention so he can show off the fort. Her conscious decision to ignore him in these scenes obviously hurts Max, as does the fact that Claire and her friends don't care about his pain when the snow fort is destroyed during a snowball fight gone awry. Jonze is careful to show that the big kids, especially Claire, see exactly what they've done and choose to walk away from it without apology or concern. Max is just a little kid, after all. He has no power to shape the behavior of older people. He does, however, have enough power to trash his sister's bedroom--so he does. He pays particular attention to destroying a gift he made for her some time ago. And then he regrets that decision, as we all regret things we've done in anger.
There's a casual mention, in this early scene, of Max and his sister spending the weekend with their dad. So later, when Max's mother is entertaining a male friend, we're not entirely surprised to see Max throw a tantrum--once again, he has no power to change what's happening around him, to stop the gradual unraveling of his family. This time, though, the frustration of being put in that position leads him to run away from his mother and sail off to the island of the Wild Things, where some smooth storytelling skills help him to establish himself as the king.
The problem with being the king, of course, is that people expect you to fix their problems. To talk about everything that happens on the island would take far too long, and the events of that experience aren't really the point anyway--suffice it to say that Max's imaginary world is similar to the real world in meaningful ways. He meets a monster who's very much like himself; when Max arrives, Carol is throwing a tantrum. Carol is frustrated by situations he can't control, too, including his rejection by another monster, KW. Carol and KW have been romantic partners at some point in the past, it seems, but KW's lank hair and big eyes are also reminiscent of Claire's. KW just doesn't feel about Carol the way she used to--she has new, more interesting friends to hang out with--and Carol doesn't understand why this is happening, and KW can't really put her feelings into words. Maybe there are no words for what she feels. She just knows that she doesn't want to hang around Carol anymore.
At one point, Carol shows Max a model world he's created, a world in which he and KW ride a canoe together down a lazy river. Some time after this--after Max has to admit that he's not a king, just a regular boy who lacks the power to shield the world from sadness, as he promised he would--Max discovers that Carol has destroyed his model in another fit of anger. And Max knows what this means: Carol has given up on thinking things in his life will ever be okay again. He worries that Carol will turn that anger against him, as well. So in the rubble of that imaginary utopia, Max leaves Carol a sign that he loves him and hopes that will make a difference.
And it does, of course. Small acts of love are the only thing that can bring us back to each other those moments of intense frustration and anger. The end of the movie, when Max leaves the island to head back home and Carol watches him leave, weeping openly, is simply heartbreaking. Max has to go back--he's just a little boy, after all, and he misses his mom. But he doesn't want to hurt Carol. He knows how painful it is to be abandoned. Still, Max has learned that you can't rely on someone else to fix your problems, and you can't run away from them either. Sometimes, lacking the power to change a situation, you just have to live with things the way they are.
Any movie that's honest about childhood has to be sad. Both my son and I were crying our eyes out by the end of the film. Many people like to romanticize childhood as a carefree and magical time in our lives, but the truth is that it's the time when we learn the hardest lessons: Human beings are often unkind to each other for no real reason. There is no magic for solving the world's problems. There is only love--and love, sadly, can disappear without warning.
Like I said, I don't know what I expected from this film. What I got was a beautiful reminder of how scary it is to be a child, powerless in a world where small acts of caring are the only defense against the Wild Things that threaten to eat us up.
