Partly, it is because Pixar is a bunch of toolbags who have nothing better to do than make evocative, complex, heart-wrenching animated films that reduce even grown men to tears — haven’t you guys heard of special forces guinea pigs, for crying out loud?! At least throw your name behind an action-packed, rock ‘em/sock ‘em Christmas Carol-themed Jim Kerry-fueled stream of urine all over Charles Dickens’s grave in 3D. Frickin’ Pixar and its love and loss and the mature employment of its craft in the search for emotional and existential truth — it’s like they never even saw Shrek 2. The nerve of some people!
But the latest maybe-it’s-still-on-ceulluloid-maybe-it’s-digital-I-am-not-that-kind-of-movie-buff emotional wrecking ball is Best Picture contender Where the Wild Things Are.
(With an increase to 10 Best Picture nominees announced for the upcoming Oscars, I’m calling a nomination, but not a win, right now. This movie is the real deal — a serious/significant work of serious/significant art — and not even the special Oscar-laundering cinemas that stay open all night can open ten different movies on New Year’s Eve.)
I’m somewhat shocked the other Overthinkers haven’t tackled this film more yet — so much so that I’m going to break my post up into smaller pieces rather than barf it all out all at once, as is my usual custom.
Why is 2009 the year of tears? What did the movies discover in the last 12 months or so that turned on the faucets for such cultural luminaries as Fenzel from Overthinking It and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper?
It all starts with growing up, growing old, and early childhood development, taught by psychedelic Tony Soprano. . .
They’re in the Pine Barrens
There’s a lot of overthinking to do on Where the Wild Things Are, but let’s start with the basics. Both the book and the movie are about a boy who uses imagination to come to terms with his emotions. Both the book and the movie are told in the third person, but are positioned from the boy’s perspective, showing things that happen only in his imagination. In both works, the boy is angry at the lack of control and power he has in his own life, and he explores that by imagining an island of wild monsters that make him their king.
And in the movie, the main one, Carol, is voiced by James Gandolfini, who does a marvelous job (calling him for a best supporting actor nomination, right now). But that’s neither here nor there (there being where they are, they being the eponymous wild things).
The biggest difference between the book and the movie? The book is ten sentences and less than 40 pages long, while the movie has to fill 90 minutes and change.
How to deal with this problem? Well, you could insult the intelligence and dignity of your audience by filling the remaining 80 minutes of your movie with unmitigated crap, like in The Cat in the Hat. That’s an option. You could also be only 10 minutes long but have nobody find out because nobody saw you, like in the Curious George movie. That’s also an option
Okay — I have no proof that is true, but it seems possible. Until some brave soul watches Curious George, we will never know.
Instead, Where the Wild Things Are the movie decides that, to help flesh out its plot, it’s going to be a little heavier on conflict and add some specifics and character development. (Basic screenwriting, people! I love it!)
Actually, I looked it up, and a whole lot of people saw Curious George -- but with marketing like this, I was really hoping they hadn't. Loved the books, though.
In the book, little Max is upset, but he’s not really upset. The book doesn’t waste precious pages giving him lots of specific things to be upset about, and the wild things reflect this by themselves being a menagerie of isolated images. Maurice Sendak, the author (who was a producer on the movie and endorses the book-to-movie conversion with more vigor than I’ve seen from an author since Howard Stern was pitching Private Parts) modeled them after his extended family, so there is some detail and a suggestion they are part pure imagination, part reflection of real people, but it’s just a suggestion. The wild things in the book are visually compelling and expressive — they have a lot of personality, but they don’t have their own stories.
In the movie, little Max is really upset, and he’s upset about a bunch of specific things. He’s also awash with other emotions. The first 20 minutes of the movie play out like the opening to a Harold (a popular long-form improvisational format played frequently by, among other people, me) — Max encounters a bunch of emotionally charged scenarios IRL, then the rest of the movie goes on a rambling journey through the subconscious implications of all this, drawing on images, motifs, characters and themes from the opening to build out the rest of what happens, with an idea of finding essential truths behind the ideas expressed at the beginning.
The wild things are also hooked into Max’s emotional life — each one represents aspects of Max’s experience of the world, people Max knows, and emotions Max feels in complex synthesis. One wild thing is the “ignored Max” — a small, sheepish (literally a ram) fellow nobody listens to who just wants to be acknowledged. Another wild thing is “the object of Max’s love for his sister and mother.” A third is “Max’s idealization of his unmet need for friendship.” A fourth is “Forrest Whitaker voices a Jewish stereotype.” Yeah, that one I haven’t quite figured out.
(Actually, I have — “Ira” is an amalgam of somebody from Max’s memory whom we do not meet in the opening, probably an uncle or grandfather; the notion of a faithful, attendant husband that Max’s absent father does not provide to his mother — although we do not know if Max’s father is a deadbeat or just vanilla dead; and Max’s memory from earlier that afternoon of the pleasure of digging holes in the snow.)
At any rate, the wild things conflict with one another and with Max, and there is a lot more specificity as to why Max is upset — although it doesn’t go to Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka levels of overexplanation — with the result that the movie is less uniformly festive than the book. In fact, it can be very sad.
Of course, it’s easy to miss just how emotionally tumultuous the book is, as well as how sad it is at times, because it’s so short and colorful. It’s easy to bypass the sad moments by just quickly turning the page — not so the movie. People who see the book as a lighthearted flight of fancy oversimplify it — the toothy monsters are not just there for giggles — but the movie is definitely sadder for longer than the book is. It digs deeper into the emotions behind Max’s self-imposed exile to the land of the wild things.
And one more note before I circle back and talk about my main points (yeah, you’ll believe it when you see it, right?) — the most obvious thing that needs to be said about this movie is that the criticisms that it paints the life of the mind of a child as too complex, too scary, too insightful, too violent, too moody, too crazy, too dark, and generally not My Little Pony-ish enough are thoroughly illegitimate.
I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last, but the “Think about the children and their fragile, joyful minds, populated only by rainbows and tulip-flavored ice cream sandwiches delivered on the backs of golden unicorns” need to shut their Fudgie the Whale-holes and pay attention to what children actually say and do, let alone try to remember how they think. If adults weren’t around, human children would be the smartest, most dangerous animals on the planet.
Granted, kids are not all Lord of the Flies characters, and not every child is as lonely or sad as Max is in this movie — but even happy, well adjusted children who confront no meaningful dangers or major losses in their lives face a huge, very scary world, which provokes imitations and reflections in the imagination.
Okay, that’s about 1500 words – there is much more to write on this topic, but it has been suggested to me recently that this is the limit on what people are generally willing to read in one sitting.
So, CONTINUED IN PART 2!!!
(Was cutting this in parts and leaving you wanting more – hopefully – a good or bad move? Should I divide monster posts in the future? Let me know in the comments!)