The first act of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ is so well done, that when the actual ‘Wild Things’ appear twenty minutes into the film, the movie goes careening off track.
What other stage in life other than childhood, can you go from euphoria to impossible loneliness in a few moments? Screenwriter Dave Eggers and director Spike Jonze know this and capture those feelings of confusion and anxiety perfectly in the first few scenes:
Like when the protagonist, Max, lonely for someone to appreciate his newly built snow fort, instigates a snowball fight with his teenage sister’s friends. The typical movie cliché at this point would be to turn the friends into one-dimensional bullies, but Eggers inserts more humanity than the typical movie would bother; the friends playfully throw snowballs back, laughing and cheering in a scene so joyous that you don’t want it to end.
Even when the playfulness does inevitably turn into hurt feelings and a crushed snow fort, the result isn’t so much sadness and anger as it is melancholy. Max, angry at his sister’s indifference trashes his sister’s room, only to clean it up minutes later after confessing to his understanding but exasperated mother.
Ironically the magic ends when Max actually travels to the island of ‘Wild Things’. Eggers, while obviously a writer of the highest order, still lacks the basics of screenwriting chops to make this story work. Convincing conflict and rising-stakes, the foundations for any effective screenplay, are mostly absent during the second act of in WTWTA, and while that may have been intentional in order to maintain the source material’s whimsical charm, it ultimately leaves the viewer less than enthralled for significant chunks of the film.
Still, it would be nice to see what Eggers & Jonze could do without the constraints of having to stay true to a ten line story.
i heard eggers novelization is really good.