‘Wild’a bit too tame: Film of Sendak classic has energy, lacks magic

In both the children's book and the new movie, the title "Where the Wild Things Are" refers to creatures who inhabit the jungle of the subconscious.

In Maurice Sendak's short, elegantly simple tale of an unruly boy named Max sent to bed without supper, children are free to impose their own personal histories on this story - his banishment is theirs, their problems are his, and the monsters are whatever they want them to be.

Spike Jonze's movie, fleshed out by novelist Dave Eggers, adds specific details to the backstory of little Max - his parents are divorced, his mother (Catherine Keener) is dating another guy, his older sister has ceased to be his companion and forsakes him for school friends.

His family has disintegrated, his world is out of control, he is afraid and angry, and when his frustration explodes into anger, he runs in shame and anger into his suburban neighborhood, then into an Oz/Wonderland of troubled imagination.

It's a curiously colorless place of bleak woods, desolate coast and desert, populated by large, furry plodding creatures who look like Saturday morning variety-show mascots (nicely voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Cooper and Forest Whitaker).

They are nominally monsters, and talk matter-of-factly about eating this strange new visitor, but the threat isn't deeply felt - Eggers crafts a disarming jokey repartee among the creatures, and Max is easily able to persuade them that he's adventuring royalty.

They make Max their own king, and this is crucial to the psychology constructed by Jonze and Eggers. Max comes from a world where he controls nothing, and now he controls everything.

For a short, exhilarating time it's heady and wonderful (for Max and for us), but the head that wears the crown is soon heavy. The resentments and rivalries of his subjects are now his responsibility - he is, in other words, the parent, and learns firsthand the tricky demands of dealing with someone as angry and as needy as, well, himself.

Most of the problems among the creatures are a projection of some domestic failure in Max's real home. It's a smart idea, but it's a schematic one, too. For all of its clever artistic judgment, or maybe because of it, the movie grows a little stifling.

Jonze takes great pains to make "Wild Things" a freewheeling, naive-primitive work. He runs around with a handheld camera, shoots in real wild places. He fills his landscape with folk art contraptions, the sound tracks with native instruments and war whoops.

His choices are sensible, often brilliant, and his movie is packed with good ideas. What you feel, though, isn't the freedom of a boy's unrestrained id and imagination, but the careful control of the man behind the curtain.

In the end, Jonze's movie has everything but the one ingredient that Sendak's simpler story has in abundance - magic.