Director Spike Jonze deftly delivers with new movie 'Where the Wild Things Are'

10/22/09 - Rarely is a movie treated as a cult classic before it's even released, but the hipster hype for "Where the Wild Things Are," has been building to a slow, Urban-Outfitters-sponsored (yes, seriously) burn for months now. And, really, it's easy to see why. The trendy trinity of a soundtrack by the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Karen O, the directorial cache of oddball wunderkind Spike Jonze, and a quirky-profound script by Dave Eggers, makes for an indie scenester's wet dream.

And while the hipper-than-thou hype may be maddening (but not that maddening because, c'mon, Spike Jonze is indisputably legit), the movie behind it is so sublimely and uniquely its own that you forget about the $28 T-shirts and $50 wall posters as soon as your butt hits the seat. The movie works spectacularly, thrillingly and brilliantly.

Yep, the "wild rumpus" has officially begun, and brace yourself, because it's a spellbinding, bizarre and darkly joyful one. It's a movie as twisted, tangled and thorny as the forest in which it takes place: filled with lumpy sad-eyed creatures who tumble around their island kingdom like furry boulders and express their feelings in an endless stream of caustic comments, insulting and bear-hugging each other with equal awkward grace.

The Wild Things have human names and messy human feelings like joy, confusion, love, jealousy, and, most notably, loneliness. They are sulky and cynical. They pick fights with each other and upend trees. They insult owls. "I never apologize to owls," Carol says bitterly to his crush, KW, after badmouthing her new lazy-eyed feathered friends, Bob and Terry. "Owls are stupid."

Jonze's answer to the sterile stock of "kids' movie" is off-kilter and unsettling...and, I suppose, that's because this is not a kids movie. At its weird, muddled heart, "Where the Wild Things Are" isn't a "kids'" movie at all. It's but a movie for grownups who still fantasize about building awesome, secret forts, who worry at times, about the sun going out, and who still feel the tug of the terror and joy of childhood.

It's a movie for childlike grownups, which probably explains the film's instant appeal to the angsty, imaginative mass of young adults who still identify with their 9-year-old selves.

And Jonze's adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are" certainly treads some murky emotional waters. Max is played by Max Records, a soulful little whippersnapper who is so believable as the lonesome, wide-eyed and energetic main character it's almost uncomfortable to watch. Charming, button-nosed movie kids don't usually bite their parents or talk about the imminent destruction of the universe with sensitive monsters, but this isn't typical family fare and thank god for that.

With a few kick-ass exceptions, a lot of "kids'" movies are the cinematic equivalent of Easy Cheese: neatly packaged, revoltingly artificial, and generally the kind of thing you'd be embarrassed to have out if company came over. (Nothing personal, but human civilization hasn't amassed thousands of years of progress to eat cheese out of an aerosol can.)

It would have been so easy for the filmmakers to simply sketch out some cheerful, uncomplicated monsters, paint Max as a sunny untroubled tyke, and let him scamper off into the sunset, ignoring entirely the mucky emotional terrain that childhood can be.

But Jonze and Eggers don't take the easy route. Instead they willfully thrash their way into new and difficult territory, creating a winsome and challenging movie. Eggers and Jonze have spun the seminal 300-word picture book into what may well become a seminal 94-minute movie. They've created the perfect antidote for a generation of kids raised on saccharine Disney Channel schlock: something substantive, imaginative, and blessedly free of Miley Cyrus.