Where the Wild Things Are on DVD

I resisted seeing Spike Jonze's adaptation of this children's book in the theaters, due to a feeling of loyalty to the original text and fear of its exploitation, Hollywood-style.  Instead, I rented the movie tonight from Red Box and enjoyed it in the comfort of my own home.  I am glad to report that the movie didn't bring my worries of exploitation entirely to life, in spite of the video game adaptation that previewed before the movie itself on the DVD.  The movie puts childhood into intense perspective and brings out some elements of the book that I hadn't really thought about before.

This movie moves abruptly from intimate to epic scales, as far as the camera goes.  The camerawork is a jolting perspective for adults, but it pushes us back to the sense of our own importance we experienced as children -- when everything was magnified, but intensely personal.  I think children shift so easily from feeling like the center of the world to feeling like nobody cares that this perspective has to be an essential element of childhood.  I found myself relaxing more and more as the movie went on, since I knew there was a happy ending waiting.  I like the way the movie ended -- subtle, wordless, but well acted and warm.  Usually I get more and more tense until the high point of tension in the movie is reached and the major conflict is resolved.  In this movie, the major conflict is internal -- will Max escape forever into the wild world, or will he come back to "civilization"?  In the end, he gets the best of both worlds -- a wild rumpus and a warm meal.  I was almost rooting for the wild world to go on forever, but I knew as soon as Max started pretending to be king that it would have to end.  The plot of the movie is not complex, thank God, and keeps to the broad outlines that Maurice Sendak wrote and drew so many years ago.  What was shocking then is commonplace now, so the violence is a little more extreme in the movie than in the book.  Still, what good would a wild rumpus be if it weren't just a little bit violent?  The movie gives names to the wild things and treats them like a blended family of sorts, and the actors do a good job of mixing family chatter with intense emotional outbursts -- enough to make viewers both fear and like the monsters.  Max is well acted by a boy who does well with presumably ad libbing some lines and acting the way boys do.  The costuming of the monsters echoes the "real life" images of the movie, in much the same way that Sendak's book was drawn from real life.  I liked the movie, though I wasn't moved to tears, and it has a lot going for it as far as source material goes.