It's never easy, my friends, and Spike Jonze knows this. Maurice Sendak's picture book tapped into the well of emotions he and millions of others were experiencing. Where some were concerned that the creatures in the book were too monstrous, that the themes were too adult, children responded in ways they may not have fully understood at the time. We all have nightmares; some laugh them off and drift back to sleep, while the rest of us lay awake in the dark, afraid, our hearts racing, our eyes darting around the room.
In his well-expressed review (linked below), Peter Galvin questions why the imaginary creatures are so "dreary" and spend so much time "sulking and discussing the futility of life," leaving the film "a terribly bittersweet experience." It is true that the creatures' eyes are big and sad and are constantly (it seems) fighting back tears. But the first big, heartfelt desire they express is to have someone to 'take the loneliness and sadness away.'
Souls that are truly depressed can't conjure up positive, uplifting fairy tales as envisioned by Walt Disney. Even the more balanced range of characters created by Pixar tend to manifest a never-say-die spirit, eventually if not immediately. Young Max (Max Records) is not quite there yet. The real heartbreak of the sequence described in Mr. Galvin's review comes right after one of his sister's friends inadvertently caves in his home-built igloo. As the bigger kids pile on in a spirit of fun, Max is briefly trapped, unable to move. It's a terrifying moment for him.
Max is quickly out of the situation, but he's clearly shook up and upset. The older kids don't stop to comfort him, or even acknowledge his near-death (in his own eyes) experience; they have somewhere to go and hurry to get in their car and go. One of the kids looks back at him, perhaps with regret and fellow feeling, and his sister is not unsympathetic when she meets his teary gaze. But they're older, and they think he's making too much of the moment to grab some attention and maybe some pity. They're probably thinking, 'Oh, what a bratty kid! It was nothing. Grow up.'
The looks that are exchanged are piercing. As adults, we know that such a moment will not be the last time that Max experiences such a dismissal of his feelings. Most of us become inured to the unintentional cruelties that we must endure at the unfeeling hands of friends and loved ones. Most people don't intend to be unkind, and if questioned will rigorously deny that was their intent, while denying that anyone was hurt by their actions.
In a similar way, Max doesn't really know why he feels the way he does. What happened to his father? We don't know. We know that his mother (Catherine Keener) is romancing a stranger (Mark Ruffalo). Max is angry, and he lashes out, and then he runs away, and then he fantasizes that he has sailed away to a land inhabited by creatures with huge, ungainly bodies and oversized heads and those eyes that are always ready to leak.
This is very much a film directed by the man who made Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and all those music videos. Bittersweet, we might say, is his middle name. Where the Wild Things Are fits comfortably into his ouevre, filled with melancholy and dreary creatures and a raging, sometimes incoherent spirit of wonder that life can be so painful, yet so beautiful.
Voice work in the film, by the way, is wonderfully expressive. Freed from the confines of expectations, James Gandolfini rages and rails as Carol, the monster who desperately wants to believe. Good, soulful, un-showy acting is also provided by Catherine O'Hara as the mean-spirited Judith, Paul Dano, Forest Whitaker, and Chris Cooper.