Where The Wild Things Are
Directed by Spike Jonze. Written by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak. With Max Records, Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker, and Chris Cooper. (PG)
There are moments in Where The Wild Things Are when you might wish you were watching a silent film, or one whose dialogue—like the beloved children's book on which it is rather loosely based—somehow came from above, drifting down to a blank page, easily overlooked, if need be. Reading the original book (or re-reading it, as I did this weekend) is a quick affair: young Max argues with his mother, travels to an imaginary land of monsters, and returns home with a new appreciation for what he has. In all, it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 15 minutes, longer if you'd like to linger on the illustrations. The film version clocks in at about 100 minutes, and that is a problem.
Directed by Spike Jonze, co-written with novelist Dave Eggers, and based on the evergreen children's story by Maurice Sendak, it probably had too much going for it from the beginning. After years of false starts, the film finally got off the ground with a team known for producing slightly eccentric but endearing work (Being John Malkovich for Jonze; indie comedy Away We Go for Eggers). Sendak gave his blessing, and the trailer was nothing short of breathtaking: finally, someone was going to get it right.
But filling that extra hour and a half isn't easy, and in a way, the obvious intelligence of all involved proves to be the downfall of the film. First, though, what they get right: the wild things themselves. They are spectacularly real; furry, hairy beasts with runny noses and crinkly eyes and enough dirt and matted snarls to make you think you can smell them. Jonze made the gutsy decision to use puppets (designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop), and it pays off in every frame—there's just enough CGI added (eyes, mouths) to keep them from seeming like overgrown Muppets. It's great work, and the film is worth seeing for that alone if you're a fan of the book.
Which makes it all the more unfortunate that the spell is broken every time they open their mouths. It's not the voices—the wild things are voiced by some great veteran actors—it's what they say. In the world of Jonze and Eggers, the creatures are wounded and aggrieved lovers, a close-knit clan suffocated by its own intimacy. (They also have names, like Carol, Judith, Ira and Douglas, that they didn't have in the book.) They resemble nothing so much as a group of sulky grad students trading partners like paperbacks. Max's big lesson comes from having to play mother to his unruly new brood.
To lighten the mood, Jonze frequently breaks away for extended montages meant to embody the pure physical exuberance of Max's time with the monsters. But after the first one, it feels like a cop-out scored to indie pop—a way to pad the running time and slip in songs crafted to appeal to the skinny-jeans set. It's part and parcel of the nearly belligerent insistence on tying the story to our own time, with a fetishistic attention to the voguish appeal of handcrafted arts (Max's soiled wolf pajamas; the twig fortress the wild things build). At its lowest point, the film feels like something made to be watched in a room whose walls are made of a rare record collection: someplace delicate and precious, but often pretentious.
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If you don't have a Jonze jones, the Valley film scene offers plenty of other distractions this week, especially if you happen to have an interest in music. Among the many cinema events along the I-91 corridor are a classic movie musical, a live broadcast from New York City's Metropolitan Opera, and two—count 'em, two—documentaries about American musicians in Africa.
First up is the 1961 song-and-dance smash West Side Story, winner of a ridiculous 10 Academy Awards—and not in the categories you never hear about, but the bigs: Best Director, Best Music, and even Best Picture (where it beat out my choice for that year, The Hustler). A Romeo and Juliet story set among warring gangs of New York, it stars Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as lovers from opposite sides of the trenches. Wood's Maria is the sister of Bernardo, head of the Puerto Rican gang known as the Sharks; Beymer's Tony is tied to the Jets, a white gang looking to rumble. Or at least dance. The supporting cast includes two more Oscar winners and the music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.
Presented as part of Hampshire College's ongoing seminar 1950s: Cold War Culture and The Birth of the Cool, the film screens at Amherst Cinema on Thursday, Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. as a one-night-only event. The screening will include an introduction and question and answer period let by Rebecca Miller, a Hampshire College music professor, fiddler and folklorist.
On Saturday, sleepy Shelburne Falls plays host to big emotion when it brings in a live, hi-def broadcast of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida from The Met. Not for the faint of heart, the four-hour event starts at 1 p.m. and includes two intermissions—but for fans of opera, it's the next best thing to being in Manhattan. Set in an imagined ancient Egypt, the opera is an epic drama (aren't they all?) that tells the tale of Ethiopian princess Aida. Enslaved in Egypt, she has captured the heart of Radam?s, commander of the Egyptian army, and the attention of Amneris, who wants Radam?s for herself. Violeta Urmana stars.
Tickets for The Met: Live in HD may seem pricey at $23, but the truth is it's something of a bargain. More importantly, the experiment in live theater broadcasts deserves support; if it continues to be a success, it's easy to imagine an expanded roster of entertainment—Broadway farces, musicals, one-man shows—that would both bolster the bottom line of local theaters and provide a more varied bill of fare for their patrons.
And then there's that unlikely piece of scheduling serendipity. This week finds Northampton's Pleasant Street Theater playing Soul Power, a documentary look at the 1974 concert held in Kinshasa, Zaire to coincide with the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (itself the subject of a fascinating documentary in When We Were Kings). Filmmaker Jeffrey Levy-Hinte edited down over 100 hours of footage, much of it shot by Grey Gardens director Albert Maysles, into his hour and a half history. The result, mostly unseen for almost four decades, is a look at American musical luminaries—including James Brown and B.B. King, among others—reconnecting with their African roots.
A different kind of roots story is told in Sascha Paladino's documentary Throw Down Your Heart, showing this week at Real Art Ways in Hartford. The film follows banjo virtuoso B?la Fleck on a journey of rediscovery, not of his own roots—he's a white guy born in New York—but those of his instrument. Though long associated in America with Southern culture, the banjo first arrived in the hands of West Africans transported here by slave traders. It's a history that illuminates much of our own troubled past, but as Fleck travels through the African continent, it's clear that music is never truly bound by the borders made by men.
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Also this week: The Shocktober series of midnight horror films continues at Pleasant Street on Saturday night. This week's film is Spider Labyrinth, an Italian "Giallo Horror" picture made in the style of Dario Argento's Suspiria. (The name reflects the traditional yellow covers of the pulp paperbacks that inspired the genre.) In this example, a professor is sent to Budapest to discover the fate of a missing fellow professor, only to get pulled into an underworld of spider worship and murder. If only he'd read the title.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
