My husband and I took our son, who will soon turn five, to see WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE last weekend. I figured that my son needed an antidote to his most recent movie experience– Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs–which was so inane and loud and transparently moralistic as to be inappropriate for viewers of any age. While Wild Things had the potential to be scary, I also knew that, between Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, it would at least be interesting.
Afterward, we had the following conversation:
Me: What did you think of the movie?
Oscar: Good
Me: What did you like about it?
Oscar: I liked everything about it. All of it.
Me: What did you think of Max?
Oscar: Good
Me: Was it scary?
Oscar: What was scary?
Me: Was the movie scary?
Oscar: None of it was scary. Not any of it.
Me: Not even the monsters?
Oscar: There weren’t any monsters. Those were just guys. Sometimes you think things are monsters when they’re just guys.
He didn’t really feel like talking about it beyond that. He had already moved on to parsing the word love. “I love popcorn,” he said. “I love eating it. That’s different from love love. When you say ‘I love popcorn,’ it’s not as much of love as when you say, ‘I love you,’ because it’s not people.”
Which pretty much demonstrates why Where the Wild Things Are is a better movie for children than many of the movies that are marketed specifically to children. Children spend a lot of time just thinking about things, figuring out their context among the adults who control their lives. Where the Wild Things Are respects the fact that children think and feel and move about the world in a state of curiosity, not to mention, at times, a state of confusion. Adults are always doing things they tell kids not to do: lying, throwing temper tantrums, cheating, eating cookies before dinner. What rational child wouldn’t find that confusing?
Whether or not you enjoy the movie (my husband was less enthusiastic than I was), you’re likely to come away from it with the impression that Dave Eggers, who wrote the screenplay, really understands kids and is able to put himself in their shoes. This isn’t surprising, given the child-centric phenomenon that is 826 Valencia, not to mention the weird and wonderful Pirate Supply Store. Eggers understands that children sometimes have emotions they can’t control, and that those emotions are every bit as scary as the proverbial monsters under the bed. He understands that a child’s most natural state is not necessarily a state of self-control, that children need room to be a little wild. He also understands that children have to deal with a lot of stuff in real life that isn’t rated G, or even PG.
Max’s single mother is loving but exhausted. She has a job and a boyfriend and a temper, and she doesn’t always know the best way to deal with her son. Wild Thing Carol, played by James Gandolfini, is the model of an abusive father–pathetic and quick to anger, by turns violent and apologetic. Ira is kind and quiet, and he’s not good at much, but he is good at making holes. Judith is a complainer and an instigator, an all-around bad apple. KW longs to escape. Alexander has a crush on a girl who doesn’t like him back, and he worries that no one listens to him. In other words, the Wild Things are a lot like us.
At one point, when Carol goes on a rampage and chases Max through the forest, KW tells Max to climb inside her mouth to hide. I glanced over at my son, thinking this would be terrifying, the stuff of nightmares. But for him it wasn’t a scary at all, just a thrillingly icky gross-out moment. He squealed with delight as Max lay in the creature’s throat, covered with saliva. Maybe he reacted this way because, by the time this scene takes place, it has been thoroughly established that KW loves Max, and that she would never harm him. So what could potentially be terrifying turns out to be kind of sweet. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘I could eat you up, I love you so.’ KW “eats” Max in order to save him, and once the danger has passed, she spits him out, slimy but intact. Any mother who has experienced the strange boundary-blurring experience of pregnancy can appreciate the intimacy of this moment.
Another beautiful moment in the film occurs when Max first arrives on the island of the Wild Things. The creatures have ganged up on him, and are wondering how he might taste, when he tells the story of how he conquered the Vikings, the story of his awesome powers. At which point the Wild Things decide to make him their king. It’s a scene that revels in the power of story, a scene that pays tribute one thing children tend to be far better at than adults: using their imaginations.
Many children’s movies talk down to children, while at the same time trying to appease some strange adult demographic presumably cooked up by a few childless Hollywood executives. These days, the majority of big-budget kids’ movies seem to be modeled on the assumption that the adults who take children to the movies–or perhaps the children themselves–have an affinity for animated characters who engage in sexual innuendo, overdone eighties pop culture references, and flatulence jokes. In the aftermath of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and many other movies in that genre that I shudder to recall, my husband and I have made a pact to choose quality over supposed age-appropriateness.
While I’d recommend that a parent or trusted adult give the film a screening before you take very young children–not all five-year-olds will be game for the boy-eating scene–it’s a great film for the eight-and-over set.
Of course, just as in the book, Max eventually goes home to his mother. When we stepped out of the dark theater into the light of day, my husband looked at me and said, “Are you crying?”
Yes, I confess. I cried. Maybe it was just because I loved the popcorn.
Other smart, artistic, adult-friendly films for kids:
The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl
The Iron Giant