Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' recent adaptation of Maurice Sendak's perpetually popular children's story was recently released in cinemas in the UK, to a less than positive critical response (also).
Crucially where I think the critics slipped up is that they were viewing the film as simply that, a 4-dimensional piece of video art to be measured with the various methodologies usually allowed for. Where Jonze exceeds their criticisms is in his creation of a wholly believable dreamscape.
Max's world, which in the book is constructed from his bedroom, bears enough similarity to reality to be convincingly created by a dreaming subconscious. Furthermore it is a place that we all recognise, our own narratives have led us, or those we know through this dreamworld of forts, fighting and raw emotion. I would go so far as to say that what Jonze has tried to recreate is not exactly the book, but a microcosm of childhood. In my opinion he has succeeded in this, despite being an adult, and that the temporal nature of this dreamscape increases its ability to deliver us from the everyday and allows us to see in it a child's elastic view of time.
In dreams our concepts of time, emotion, even objects and the normal are wholly warped, just as they were as children. Jonze's film with its quickly fluctuating relationships, and drastically divergent (yet spatially adjacent) climates fits both with the worlds we know from dreams and from our childhoods.
So Where the Wild Things Are has succeeded (as Jonze has done before in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) to create for us, that most elusive of goals, a positive escape into his film.
No comments:
Post a Comment