You have to give points to Spike Jonze for even trying. Bringing Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” to the silver screen is a task fraught with peril. For starters, “Where the Wild Things Are” isn’t just a good book or even a classic it is an epiphany, the distillation of an essential ingredient of being a boy.

Sendak found that primal enthusiasm for chaos and when he did, he did something very smart. He didn’t analyze it, he didn’t judge it, he simply celebrated it for what it was: the reason why sand castles get smashed, why clean carpets are traversed with muddy footprints and why the poor family dog deserves extra treats at Christmas.

Maurice Sendak defined for NFL linebackers everywhere what the term “inner child” is really all about and I’m reasonably sure that when Hannibal led his elephants over the Alps he whispered under his breath, “Let the wild rumpus start!”
But Jonze is, if anything, a fearless director and in translating “Where the Wild Things Are” into a live action film he starts out with some good choices.

The appropriately named Max Records is perfect as Max, the incorrigible hero of Sendak’s book. In the book, Max is a creature of admirable self-possession who upends the tranquility of his household by charging around in his wolf costume and earns himself a trip to his bedroom without supper. Once he’s locked away, Max’s room is magically transformed into a forest and young Max heads out on a sailboat in search of adventure. What he finds is an island full of monsters—creatures with appetites as unconstrained as his own and with the terrible teeth and terrible claws required to satisfy them. The charm of Sendak’s book is that to Max they are soul mates. In short order he subdues them, is crowned their king, and leads them on a wild rumpus of prodigious proportions.

Whatever his other acting talents, the character of Max requires a feral boyishness and young Mr. Records delivers. One can only imagine studio executives demanding a better-known child actor on the order of a modern-day Macaulay Culkin (who had no rumpus in him). Jonze dodged a bullet on this one.

The character of Max is helped by the costume designers who came up with an inspired wolf suit that is both true to the book and still works in live action. The film’s most evocative scenes capture Max silhouetted against the horizon cavorting in his costume. For the briefest moment you are transported into the book.

Jonze also gets help from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop who created the costumes for Max’s monster friends. The costumes are handsomely done and allow for more intimate interaction between Max and the monsters than computer graphics could have achieved.

Where Jonze gets no help from Sendak is that the original book is very, very short, a fact that ultimately derails his efforts. Film adaptations seem to work best when the original source material has some bulk to it. Screenwriters need corners to tuck an extra scene or two into or, better yet, some fat to trim while creating their cinematic vision. But “Where the Wild Things Are” has no fat to play with. It is pre-distilled down to an essential artistic statement.

Jonze pumps in all sorts of backstory to plump a three-hundred-word children’s story into a hundred-minute film. In the process he squeezes the joy—and Sendak—right out of the film. Jonze’s Max is an unhappy kid whose single mother (Catherine Keener) has just found a romantic interest and whose sister (Pepita Emmerichs) has abandoned him for the adolescent delights of boys and cars. Max heads off for the island of the wild things not as an adventure but an escape from an unhappy home.

But, it only gets worse. The monsters Max falls in with aren’t manifestations of his primal boyish enthusiasms; they are bundles of primal middle-age angst. They have relationship issues. They have less of a need to pull trees out by the roots than they have a need to talk things out (one of them is named Ira for gosh sakes!). While Jonze’s vision is very creative it has more than its share of dreariness. This is a film that feels like it was written for family therapists not for outlaw eight-year-olds.

Jonze has a point. Life is complicated and full of conflicts, even for kids. But what Sendak saw and Jonze didn’t is that for all the complexity each of us deals with in our lives, every once in a while we have the good fortune to touch some primal chord—some amoral joy of our very being—and that is what “Where the Wild Things Are” is all about.

You can view a trailer of “Where the Wild Things Are” on the web at:
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi3225158169/

Directed by Spike Jonze
Rated PG
(Two stars)