‘Wild Things,’ you make my heart sing – somewhat

The most memorable aspect of the “Where the Wild Things Are,” the 1963 children’s book written by Maurice Sendak, is Sendak’s own illustrations. It is stunning but simple – giant, yellow-eyed, hairy monsters with sharp claws romping in the wilderness. Sendak uses few words in telling the story.

In the film version of the award-winning book, Spike Jonze stays visually true to the original creatures, but reworking a book with 300+ words into a two-hour movie is a daunting task, even for the director who took us inside John Malkovich’s head.

Jonze sets the stage brilliantly with a bouncing handheld shot of Max (Max Records) chasing his dog around the house. Throw in a snowball fight and a homemade fort, and it feels like childhood all over again.

But life can never be easy for a hyperactive, imaginative kid, and we know his mother (Catherine Keener) must send Max to his room without supper before the adventure can begin.

Teaming with co-writer David Eggers (“Away We Go”), Jonze faced the daunting task of creating a script from a book with a few sentences and several drawings. As in the book, little Max takes a boat to the land of the wild things and finds himself as king. The rest of his adventure can be regarded as either a thematic meeting of the different parts of Max’s psyche or a bunch of sporadic horseplay with no apparent direction.

The wild things are voiced by well-known actors (James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Cooper) and thanks to a humongous budget, they not only resemble the creatures in the book, but they look incredibly realistic. It is impossible to distinguish between the CGI and costumed versions of the creatures.

Relative newcomer Max Records does an astounding job as the empowered child who controls his world through imagination.

Having to shift between angry, sad, rebellious and assertive in the face of ferocious monsters, he plays the demanding role with innocent realism.

For its appearance and effects, “Where the Wild Things Are” should receive well-deserved accolades, but the film is simply too long. Witnessing the vivid imagination of a young boy is beautifully retrospective, but not when filtered through the imagination of a 40-year-old named Spike.