Where The Wild Things Are

I think my seven year old son and I may be the only people in America right now who don’t like the movie “Where the wild things are.” Even President Obama noted that he spent last weekend watching it with his daughters and that he thought it was “pretty good.” I am not sure what went wrong for us but my son’s thumbs down sign and comment “its a big bummer” at the end of it pretty much summed it up. It was a big bummer. Granted, it is a visually beautiful film. It is sensitive in its depictions and emotionally insightful. Yes, the monsters live up to all the vividness that childhood imagination can muster (not an easy feat for sure) and the scenery is both evocative and breathtaking. The director clearly loved this project and it shows through the nuances in the costumes, the acting, the music and the script. And yet, the movie ultimately left me feeling like I wished I hadn’t seen it. More importantly, I wished I hadn’t taken my two children to it.

Genevieve, my two year old, had no problems with it. To her, the big hairy wild things were fun and cuddly and loveable. Their romps through the forest, the smashing of their “nests” and their massive piling up on one another to sleep was taken at face value – pure entertainment. There were no dark subtexts and certainly no unsettlingly ambiguous feelings. My seven year old boy, Dominic, on the other hand, clearly experienced the darker side of the movie. He found it disturbing that the teenagers at the start of the movie smashed Max’s carefully crafted igloo and did not understand why that had to happen. “It wasn’t in the book, mom. Why were they so mean?” My son gasped when Max ended up in the throat of one of the wild things and sobbed when Max ultimately left the beasts crying on the shore to return home. My son’s discomfort was not particularly assuaged by the moments of fun and frivolity. Rather, both he and I felt the disconcerting undercurrent of menace and danger that lurked throughout the film. Dominic sobbed at the end and said that the film was “nothing like the book.” I agreed. Sendak’s beautiful musings on the freedom of childhood expression, escapism and the ultimate safe harbor provided by a loving family were hardly traceable in the movie. Instead, we got a dark, dark film about the damage of dysfunctional families and its enduring presence in our lives. Whether in dreams or reality, the cold, sad limits of family relationships (a major theme in this movie) left both me and my family wanting to escape back to Sendak’s world where no matter what happens dinner will be waiting for you and it will be “still hot.”