Review: "Where the Wild Things Are" (Sadly) Isn't Worth Visiting

According to Rottentomatoes.com, Where the Wild Things Are, which opens on Friday, is getting mixed-to-decent reviews. I'm trying hard to wrap my mind around this, because I saw the film on Monday, and it simply doesn't work.

Because of all the buzz, I suspect the movie will open strong, but I'll be shocked if the box office doesn't collapse as word-of-mouth gets out about how muddled and frequently outright boring it is.

But I'll grant you that it's not terrible in the way that earlier "bad" movies this year have been — movies such as G-Force (which was soul-less and completely by-the-numbers) or Year One (which was a meandering, painfully unfunny mess).

Director Spike Jonze at least tried to make something truly different. Much has been made of the fact that he was trying to create the sense of being a nine-year-old boy — the sense of confusion, the feeling that the world doesn't make much sense.

Well, he succeeded in that respect.

Here's the thing: Where the Wild Things Are is a classic children's book (by Maurice Sendak, an out gay author) about an angry kid who learns that he can control his own anger — that his anger isn't an out-of-control "wild" monster that controls him. The book is sophisticated and definitely works on an "adult" level, but it's so brilliant because, in its deceptive simplicity, it also works on a "kid" level.

Where the Wild Things Are, the movie, doesn't even try to work on a "kid" level. If this movie is supposed to be from the point-of-view of a nine year-old boy, why do all the monsters sound like neurotic, ironic (if stupid) college students?

There's a whole genre of brilliant, sophisticated, but subversive children's movies that go on to find widespread success: Time Bandits, Toy Story, Billy Elliot, My Life as a Dog, Babe, and even Beauty and the Beast, to name just a few.

Why can these movies be appreciated by the "unthinking" masses, but also by film aficionados looking for multi-layers and deeper meanings? Because first and foremost, they take their characters, and their story, seriously.

I never felt that Where the Wild Things Are did. It seemed to me that, first and foremost, the filmmaker wanted to make a POINT about how childhood is "confusing," to show how clever and avant garde he is — "Look, I don't need to have a plot!" — or maybe just to show us some (admittedly) cool film imagery.

There's a little flurry of an interesting conflict toward the end, and the brilliant Catherine O'Hara has some funny lines as one of the monsters, but otherwise, story and character barely seem to matter.

Instead, it's a movie with a ten-minute sequence where the main character goes on a journey to look at a model-city one of the monsters made. There's another ten-minute sequence where the characters have a dirt-clod fight.

Um, yeah. I'm as sick as the next film critic that every kids' movie has be about saving the world or keeping some parents from getting a divorce, but even I need more than this.