The announcement that Maurice Sendak’s beloved landmark children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” would be adapted into a full-length Hollywood film sparked an epidemic of convulsive rejection among the large and diverse community raised on its beautifully simplistic tale of an unruly boy dealing with discipline and the emotional turbulence of childhood through magical escapism.  Hollywood has developed an entire business model based on ruining — either over-sentimentalizing or under-valuing –  existing properties with established fanbases, be they films or literature.

That same disgusted reaction, however, was radically transformed into a frenzy of hipster devotion when visionary director, Spike Jonze of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” joined the project, and even further revolutionized by the utterly striking Arcade Fire-scored debut trailer that ranks as one of the most breathtakingly perfect pieces of promotional editing ever released.  (See it below).

But the finished product is a different animal entirely.  It’s neither the family friendly exercise in contrived sentimental banality Hollywood has come to be synonymous with, nor is it the soullessly whimsical hipster film that yearns for the sake of yearning.  Jonze, divorced from the manic brilliance of screenwriter savant, Charlie Kaufman, has created a deeply flawed though bravely uncompromising and audacious work of cinema that exists not as a  fleshed out extension of Sendak’s archetypal image of youth, but as a wholly original vision beholden to neither cinematic nor literary convention.

Max (Max Records) is a wolf-pajama-clad 9-year-old boy, a wild thing.  The very first images we see are of Max violently playing with the family dog.  The camera shakes uncontrollably as the savage boy grunts and screeches like a beast.  The same rawness is showcased minutes later in a spiteful, destructive temper-tantrum after his elaborate snow fort is decimated by his big sister’s friends while she stands idly by.  Max’s emotional ferocity is intentionally and candidly lacking the whimsy or romance so often retroactively applied to childhood.  Jonze immediately establishes a mood of unsparing deliberateness entirely at odds with what the trailer suggests, while simultaneously preparing his audience for the dramatic weirdness and sans-logic freedom that shapes the psyche of a 9-year-old boy.

Max’s feelings of isolation and neglect burst to the surface during a particularly defiant spat of disobedience at the dinner table that enrages his mother (Catherine Keener).  Her attempts to force respect lead to a scuffle that ends with Max biting her on the shoulder, running away in the middle of the night and sailing off into treacherous, unknown waters.  He find himself on the shores of a magical new world of majestic forests, rugged terrain, and vasts deserts, inhabited by strange giant beasts that want to eat him until he declares himself their king.  As soon as they accept Max as their ruler we learn that these wild beasts are far more than the reactionary animals they at first seemed.  Carol (James Gandolfini), Alexander (Paul Dano), Judith (Catherine O’Hara), Ira (Forest Whitaker), The Bull (Michael Berry Jr.),  and KW (Lauren Ambrose) are a sort of makeshift family with complex emotions and meaningful relationships.

The plot here virtually dissipates in favor of exploring the inner-workings of each character and the unique dynamics of their relationships with each other and with Max.  They have a wild rumpus, build a fort, bicker, have a dirt-clod fight, gossip, and all sleep in a big pile.  But, an unshakable air of melancholy cuts sharply through the scattered moments of joy, levity, and exhilaration.  These wild things are not happy.  “Will you keep out all the sadness?” one of them asks Max.  When it becomes obvious that he can’t, the same unrelenting sadness that provoked the creation of this fantasy world in the first place consumes him even in make-believe.

The universally stellar voice-acting is key to Jonze’s vision.  Gandolfini’s conflicted Carol is a brilliantly realized amalgam of tender father figure and Max’s construction of what fatherhood means.  (His parents are divorced).  Lauren Ambrose’s KW delicately mimics the distinct cadences of his mother while offering warmth and sometimes even protection from Carol.  The others are either representations of real people or Max’s personified emotions.

Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are” represents the efforts of an inadequately equipped adolescent boy at making sense of the emotional and psychological complexities of life that he can’t yet understand.  As such, it is at once frustrating, poignant, boring, fascinating, frightening, beautiful, painful, light-hearted, brooding, hilarious, and most of all, honest.

Score: 4/5