Trailer Review: Where The Wild Things Are

Where The Wild Things Are
Director: Spike Jonze
Starring: Max Records, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener
Trailer Released By: Warner Bros

If you’re anything like me, Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are occupies such a hallowed place in your childhood that the most important aspect of any movie adaptation is that they not ‘fuck it up’. Many were excited to see hipster kings Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze take the reins of this project (and recruit their hipster friends such as Karen O, who’s writing songs for the soundtrack), but personally I worried that they would trample with their New Authentic whimsy over a story that’s essentially about the angry, inarticulate parts of the childish imagination. In my book, that’d be more of a ‘fuck-up’ than some Chris Columbus-helmed Home Alone 4: Where The Wild Things Are.

Sendak himself is said to have approved of Eggers and Jonze’s vision, but around this time last year, coolsies got their American Apparel knickers in a knot over reports that the entire film might need to be reshot. Reportedly, test audiences found it “too scary”, and complained that Max Records, the child actor playing the protagonist, Max, “seems confused and not charming at all”.

A year later, we finally have an official trailer. Did the studio have their sunny way with the film? Have a look.

The visuals are astoundingly good. I love the scenes with Max in his boat – just as I’d imagined them. If it looks at all familiar, that’s because according to Film Victoria, parts of Williamstown, Werribee, the Dandenongs and Bushman’s Bay appear in the trailer.

But what I find really exciting about this trailer is the unkempt, animalistic appearance of the Wild Things, and the naturalistic way they inhabit their environment. I love how real they look, rather than stylised; it packs such a visual punch to have these creatures roaming through idyllic landscapes. Indeed, some of the dreamy landscape shots remind me of Jonze’s video for Weezer’s ‘Island In The Sun’.

Unlike the book, which takes place almost entirely in the realm of Max’s imagination, the trailer shows that the film will explore Max’s ‘real’ world. Was Max banished to his room without his supper because he’s angry at being bullied in school, or that his mum (Catherine Keener) is getting it on with Mark Ruffalo?

His mother called him "Wild thing!" And Max said: "I'LL EAT YOU UP!"

The trailer also seems to imply that the film will extend past the events of the book to show how Max’s adventures with the Wild Things inform his ordinary life. I really hope it doesn’t. That would be exceedingly lame, much as The NeverEnding Story was completely ruined by the stupid last scene in which Bastian rode Falkor to get revenge on the bullies who’d tormented him.

Another question raised by the trailer is whether Max develops a special relationship with Carol (James Gandolfini), the Wild Thing we see making the little figurine of himself and Max in the boat.

As an aside, it’s such a shame that Eggers and Jonze have seen fit to rename the Wild Things when they had such awesome names already: Aaron, Bernard, Emil, Moishe and Tzippy. They were all named after Sendak’s aunts and uncles, “who visited his childhood home in Brooklyn every Sunday, pinched his cheeks and ate all the food in sight.”

For me, what really ruins this trailer is its surfeit of hipster whimsy. The twee Arcade Fire song; the deliberately wonky hand-drawn titles; the lame insistence that “inside all of us is HOPE… inside all of us is FEAR…” Gawker’s Richard Lawson nailed my discomfort when he notes that “we’re a little wary of just how hip it seems. We knew that one day soon (read: already) kids would be cooler than us, but it happened so fast.”

I’m still holding out hope that the finished film won’t be as insufferably twee as this trailer. There’s enough here to keep me thinking they haven’t fucked it up yet.

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