Film Review: Where the Wild Things Are (Spoilers)
It’s a children’s story so it shouldn’t work for adults. It doesn’t have a plot so it shouldn’t work for anyone. Very little even appears in it, other than some imaginary monsters, one of them voiced by James Gandolfini who essentially just plays Tony Soprano again – it shouldn’t work for film buffs. But director Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s bedtime story is sublimely wonderful – it’s an ideas factory the likes of which you only see once a generation, with enormous heart and intelligence, and Jonze (with co-screenwriter Dave Eggers) delivers it with the gentlest of touches. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ manages to get away with filming the unfilmable by allowing the audience’s imaginations to run riot. It’s never clear exactly what’s going on (remember ‘Being John Malkovich’?) – are the monsters aspects of Max’s own personality? Has he travelled into another dimension? Is it all just a dream? Is Jonze trying to tell us something about growing up? The director allows us, to access the film as we please, refusing to spoon feed his audience, but still takes us on an utterly convincing emotional journey. Max plays and confronts some harsh truths about growing up – nothing else happens, and you’re free to read in any subtext that suits in this enchanting story.
The superb acting (particularly by the remarkable Max Records) and CGI so good you rarely know you’re looking at it, add a surprising, extra level of accessibility to such a rich, almost abstract fantasy. You aren’t spoon fed who the monsters are, what (presumably of Max) they represent, but you know that they and the world they inhabit are vitally important to him and this is where the attention to detail becomes so important. Max gets to play out choices which are closing down for him in the real world, living a child’s experience one last time, and Jonze puts his inner world on display, managing to add an adult subtext to a threadbare children’s bedtime story, in a triumph of his own imagination. Who wouldn’t after all at any age want to run away and lord it over monsters, getting them to shape the world for us as we see fit? It may be quite often a very sad film, but it offers hope for us all to be accepted just as we are. Truly a story for our disillusioned times.
9/10
Film Review: Away We Go (Spoilers)
I’m a Sam Mendes fan. I loved ‘American Beauty’, but this just fell flat for me. Don’t get me wrong, I know how good leads John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph were, I liked the indie feel to it, the theatrical pacing and the general positivity, but it felt like the film was trying to say something, and didn’t know quite what. Was this another Mike Leigh-style ‘Happy-Go-Lucky’? Was it a romantic comedy? Was it a social commentary on the nature of parenthood, with some gentle comic observations thrown in? Who could say? I was just left not really caring.
Krasinski and Rudolph’s relationship really is a delightful break from the stereotypical norm – not only have they been together for a long time, but they remain completely in love, and there are no skeletons in the closet ready to tear them apart; they’re also having a baby. When his parents (Jeff Daniels & Catherine O’Hara) declare they’re going to move to Antwerp, Rudolph acknowledges it’s time for them to move on too. The road trip they embark on crosses paths with distant relations, former classmates and bosses, all in a search for what defines home and what makes a good parent. Ex-boss Alison Janney in Arizona and cousin Maggie Gyllenhaal in particular liven things up with some sharp comic turns (particularly Janney) and act as perfectly dysfunctional foils to our entirely stable heroes, but director Mendes does little more than scratch the surface of why there should be such a contrast. Where Mike Leigh’s heroine’s unflinching happiness and fundamentally good nature deeply affected those around her, the effect Krasinski and Rudolph have is only hinted at. We see their perceptions challenged by the people they come across (and their steadfastness is impressive in the continuing age of grim & gritty), but Mendes offers no conflict of note for us or them; the ending is particularly schmaltzy. A genuinely interesting film about middle-age-on-the-horizon was there for the taking, but instead he delivers an episodic tick-sheet of ‘what parenthood is about’.
Having said that the film is entirely about Krasinski and Rudolph, and they are more than up to the task. As a pairing they’re flawless, and Rudolph in particular shines, doing blissfully little to give added depth to what might otherwise have been a very bland character, particularly when up against Krasinski’s amiable goofiness. But they could have been so much more. Writers Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida have written a cute, but ultimately throwaway film – highly engaging, but I left the cinema thinking ‘so what?’
7/10
