I just finished watching Where the Wild Things Are, which is easily one of the best movies that I have seen over the past year.
It is not a perfect film, but it has moments that capture an exuberant, kinetic and pure joy of a kind I’ve very rarely experienced since childhood. There are moments in the film that reach inside to your own wild thing, that make you want to move along to the wild rumpus on screen. Moments that capture an essence of youth on film both boisterously and delicately, leaving it intact so that energy can leap back out into the audience. I spent most of the film with Max where the wild things were, and the tiniest bits of it with old friends during recess at the Crow Island Woods. Even as I write this, I am remembering in first grade when we tunneled under the fence to escape the playground, how we managed to keep the project secret for what seemed like years but was really days (I would have said that it seemed like millennia, but we barely had conception of months).
But Wild Things is not content with that vivacity. It also explores the casual but harsh cruelty of childhood, the breed of fractiousness and fear that comprise an all too real aspect of early life. It’s easy to build a great fort, but it’s hard to get everyone to be inside it together; as the wild rumpus starts the sun is dying and the world is slowly grinding from rock to sand to dust. Smiles and tears are both integral to the movie, but neither overpowers the other. Wild Things is neither schmaltzy nor sad. It is beautiful, a movie about childhood that was, in the end, not really made for real children, but for inner ones.
Here is the trailer:
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