two stars

Reviewed by Daniel E. Jennis

Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” blasts as a young boy runs through a forest with a horde of wild beasts. He relishes in his newfound freedom and respect as advertisers remind us that there is a Wild Thing alive in all of us. Sentimental, poignant, and tonally complex, the trailer for “Where the Wild Things Are” generated a surge of excitement and wonder that can hardly be matched in such a terse and incomplete format.

Yet when Director Spike Jonze filled in the gaps, and created a feature length version of the famous Maurice Sendak children’s novel, he added very little in the way of story or character that was not already evidenced in the highly-talked about trailer. This whimsical kid’s film, despite being imaginative and daring, is ultimately hollow and perplexing.

Max (Max Records) is a young child with a lot of emotional problems who expresses himself through inarticulate fits of rage and desperate pleas for attention. His mother (Catherine Keener) generally ignores him, so much so that Max retreats into a fantasy world in which he can live out his dreams of grandeur.

Max runs away from home and escapes to a magical island where he encounters a colony of beasts that face serious emotional problems of their own. Max declares himself king of the Wild Things, and unsuccessfully attempts to forge a peace between the volatile and easily confused creatures.

The first thirty minutes of the film presents us with an incredibly sad and poignant portrait of a boy whose creative energy is ignored by his unsympathetic family. This sequence is actually very difficult to watch at times, and reminds us all of moments in our childhood when we felt abandoned or scorned.

But shortly after Max flees to the island of the Wild Things, the film really falls apart. The monsters primarily serve as secondary characters, Freudian dolls per se, who seem to represent intangible fragments of the spectrum of human emotions. The beasts are inarticulate and contradictory in their yearnings, and most of their screen time consists of them reacting to stimuli that audiences cannot see or understand.

For the last hour or so, the film really meanders, very little happens in terms of the plot, and Jonze expects the creative visuals and very tricky tone to carry the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, the premise just wears thin, and we lose sight of the protagonist and his struggles. The king of beasts reigns over his sullen creatures, lost in a fantasy world that isn't the least bit fantastic.