I saw
Where the Wild Things are last weekend. It was very intensely interesting and moving. I got into a discussion online with some people who said they didn't want to see it because the music in the trailer turned them off. One person compared it to "weak norwegian folk music sung by tone deaf high people". Actually, this is not far off the mark. But if you see the movie, you will understand that the music isn't supposed to be "good".
The most striking thing to me about the movie (other than that I cried for a half hour after it was over, and again every time I tried to talk about it) is that it defies a normative narrative convention of conflict-tension-resolution. I mean, it's not news that many movies have taken various approaches to the idea of portraying "real life" in one form or another, thus requiring a departure from the breaking-things-down-into-units-of-narrative-logic. This does it in a way that is different from any other movie I've ever seen, and it does it well.
The point of the movie is to put you inside the head of a lonely, lovable, scared child, living in difficult circumstances, who doesn't understand why the world is not how he wants it to be, doesn't understand his own emotions, doesn't understand other people's emotions. It does this better than anything else I've ever seen. It is not comfortable to experience Max's mental landscape. The music did not make me comfortable. Nothing about the movie made me comfortable. It was profoundly moving.
The story I read is that Maurice Sendak, the author of the original book, asked Spike Jonze to make a film adaptation after seeing
Being John Malkovich. This movie has a similar trippy eeriness to it as
Malkovich, a similar sense of being inside someone else's experience. I imagine that was the appeal of Jonze as a director.
I highly recommend this movie, especially for anyone who considers her/himself a student of the interplay of inner and outer phenomenal reality.
