Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)

“As we awake refreshed from our dreams, better able to meet the tasks of reality, so the fairy store ends with the hero returning, or being returned to the real world, much better able to master life.”

- Bruno Bettelheim

A wolf-suited blur of unfocussed aggression, Max hurtles down the staircase – a fork clenched in his fist – in pursuit of the terrified family dog. The camera, handheld, careens with him like an accomplice. Wildness, yes. But not the exhilaration, the temporary unbounded freedom of acting out – of trapping one’s hurt like lightning in a bottle to release it later in a burst of electric, savage creativity. Here, there is only the white-hot immediateness of anger, the confusion and helplessness that turns on and snarls at smaller things. Almost immediately, however, the frame freezes, and Max’s furious pursuit is cruelly halted – not as an authoritative preventive measure, but as an authorial intercession that denies the boy any liberation from the bewilderment of his young life.

For Maurice Sendak, a private jungle emerges from a boy’s bedroom in order to offer up a dark haven where he might disgorge all his fears and anger in a secret rumpus. This is not to be taken as the condescending reduction of a child’s tantrum; it is a measure of respect for their attempts at fashioning dimensions of solitude where they cannot be dominated or frightened or disappointed – where we cannot touch them. It is also Sendak’s achievement to insist that the inevitable decision to return from this solitude belongs to the young adventurer in question. A hot supper will await him, yes, but the journey back to familial concord will be on his terms, and that private jungle will recede at his behest.

For Spike Jonze, by contrast, family becomes yet another incomprehensible structure from which his young protagonist cannot escape, as befuddling and pathetic a universe as those found in Being John Malkovich or Adaptation (or even some of his more downbeat music videos). Max is driven from his house into the night – away from the perceived betrayals and tyrannies of his sister and mother – towards the little boat that bears him away. Already Jonze has forsaken the crucial autonomy that the book accords the boy. Subsequently, the world into which Max burrows is not an expansive kingdom within the confines of a bedroom, but a hermetic dimension beyond the constrictive boundaries of the familiar. His voyage is an exilic retreat rather than a restorative adventure.

Just as Max is paralysed by the opening freeze-frame, so too is he pitilessly condemned to a realm that is a warped and cryptically refracted image of his home. These wild things are haunted by an unnamed sadness, riven by jealousies and petty resentments, and given to inexplicable bouts of rage and reactionary hostility. Even the initially exquisite natural lighting becomes oppressive in its unvarying twilit tones – as if the sun really were dying, as Max and Carol (his monstrous analogue) fear.

On the one hand, Jonze and Eggers’ screenplay is admirable for its attempt to adopt an amorphous child-like logic: Max attempts to work out these all-too-familiar mystifying conflicts and half-understood problems through improvisational stories and games with ever-evolving rules. On the other, the film pessimistically thwarts every effort to resolve these troubles. Max’s time with the wild things is profoundly melancholic, and characterised by confusion, loss, and ultimately defeat. Although he is declared “King” of this realm, his fraudulence is eventually exposed and he is driven away once again. Unlike the intentional abdication of the throne in Sendak’s story, Max is overwhelmed by his circumstances and surrenders.

Jonze subsequently ends the film ambiguously with Max watching his mother succumb to an exhausted sleep at the kitchen table, but nothing we have seen so far warrants an interpretation of his gaze as an epiphanic reversal of parent-child relationships. The mother remains an inscrutable mystery – yielding up none of her secrets in sleep – and the son can only look upon her with a yearning that is never to be appeased. Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are offers no respite from the fundamental incapacities that it perceives at the heart of childhood, and no opportunity for an emergent self-sovereignty to establish the beginnings of a dominion.

September Film Journal

Ikiru (1952) * * * * *
Silent Light (2007) * * * * *

Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922) * * * *1/2
Let the Right One In (2008) * * * *1/2

Inglorious Basterds (2009) * * * *
When Did You Last See Your Father (2008) * * * *

Duplicity (2009) * * * 1/2

Lou Reed's Berlin (2008) * * *1/2

I Love You, Man (2009) * * *
Body of Lies (2008) * * *
51 Birch Street (2006) * * *

The International (2009) * *1/2
La Strada (1954) * *1/2

Crisis (1950) * *
The Reader (2008) * *
Taken (2009) * *

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) *
Watchmen (2009) *

Summer Viewing

Hello fellow cinemaniacs,

You may have noticed the Film Journal sidebar. I hope to be maintaining it on a biweekly basis. For those who might be curious about my summer viewings, I present the following list (from the seminal to the deplorable):

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) * * * * *

Synecdoche, New York (2008) * * * * *

Bamako (2007) * * * *1/2

The Decline of the American Empire (1986) * * * *1/2

Up (2009) * * * *1/2

Bolt (2008) * * * *

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) * * * *

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1984) * * * *

Rachel Getting Married (2008) * * * *
Wendy and Lucy (2008) * * * *

Ashes of Time Redux (2008) * * *1/2

Blast of Silence (1961) * * *1/2

The Class (2008) * * *1/2

Frozen River (2008) * * *1/2

Lake of Fire (2007) * * *1/2

Milk (2008) * * *1/2

Pontypool (2009) * * *1/2

Revolutionary Road (2008) * * *1/2

Snow Angels (2008) * * *1/2

Son of Rambow (2008) * * *1/2

Star Trek (2009) * * *1/2

Still Life (2007) * * *1/2

The Wrestler (2008) * * *1/2

Appaloosa (2008) * * *

Changeling (2008) * * *

Diary of the Dead (2008) * * *

Encounters at the End of the World (2008) * * *

Frost/Nixon (2008) * * *

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) * * *

House of Flying Daggers (2004) * * *

Ichi the Killer (2001) * * *

I've Loved You So Long (2008) * * *

JCVD (2008) * * *

Quantum of Solace (2008) * * *

Role Models (2008) * * *

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) * * *

Valkyrie (2008) * * *

Cadillac Records * *1/2

Gran Torino (2008) * *1/2

Hamlet 2 (2008) * *1/2

Of Time and the City (2009) * */12

Step Brothers (2008) * *1/2

W. (2008) * *1/2

Yes Man (2008) * *1/2

Doubt (2008) * *

The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) * *

Mongol (2008) * *

Religulous (2008) * *

Sukiyaki Western Django (2008) * *

Sunshine Clearing (2009) * *

Watchmen (2009) *

Wolverine (2009) *

Feel free to chime in with comments, criticisms, or suggestions for my ever-expanding viewing list.

For all of you cinephiles who don't already know about this enterprise, check out the following sites: The 1,000 Greatest Films and The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films, both sponsored by the indispensable They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (see my sidebar Links for their home page).

Duplicity (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

Duplicity commences with an engaging pas de deux between two predatory cats – a series of shifting tactics, performative evaluations, and self-aware flirtations – that winds its way into the bedroom of a four star hotel in Dubai. The dance ends in an unconventional manner – Julia Roberts drugging Clive Owen and making off with top-secret documents left in his charge – and with a stylistic, Soderberghian flourish: moving split-screens present several moments from various stages of Roberts post-coital departure. In one frame, she has already left the room; in another, she simultaneously checks on the slumbering Owen. This spy is forever in two places at once – caught between an impossible but undeniable attraction on the one hand and a kind of self-interested professionalism that could only erode the trust from which that attraction might flourish.

This is Duplicity’s central dilemma, and the stuff of true screwball fantasies. It is followed immediately by another dance of sorts – this time between the CEOs of two cosmetic juggernauts – and its petty brutality and clumsiness is a hilarious contrast to the sleek, animal elegance of its precursor. On a greyish landing strip of an anonymous airport, two parked Lear jets face off against one another in frank symmetry. Rattling his finger like a sabre in super slow-motion on the right side of the frame in the following cut – his face somehow undulating with hatred – is Tom Wilkinson venting his spleen towards someone out of frame. With a cut, Paul Giamatti is revealed on the far left of the frame, equally enraged. As if slogging through currents of bile, the two gradually make their way toward one another, while their horrified cronies look on. The two titans meet, and the ensuing clash seems to last hours, even though it’s only a brief scuffle: the professorial Wilkinson and the gnomish Giamatti flail about on the tarmac in a brutish reduction of the corporate warfare upon which Roberts and Wilson will try to capitalize.

Between these contrasting “numbers,” are labyrinthine twists and turns of plots, layers of deception, and exquisitely played acts of self-conscious performances. James Naremore has spoken of “expressive incoherence” as being an important aspect of an evaluative assessment of acting: scenes in which we are presented with a performer consciously performing within the story (acts of deception, or moments of emotional repression are good examples). Duplicity – as its title implies – is rife with such moments: Clive Owen channelling Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) as he masquerades as a clumsy Texan doctor is one delicious example. But a great part of the film’s pleasures are also built upon moments of performance that are surprisingly revealed as such, and scenes in which diegetic audiences explicitly mirror our own regard for the aptitude of the principal actors.

The pre-eminent example is the “rehearsed” encounter between Owen and Roberts, in which they literally replay a scripted version of one of their previous venomous encounters in order to throw off the suspicion of their employers (who may be – and in fact are – following their every move). This encounter is originally played straight, and we are provided with a forum to compare their biting repartee to the lacerations that the two actors inflicted upon one another in their previous outing, Closer (2004). A brief moment of surreality occurs later, when their dialogue is repeated word for word (with some notable variations) in a flashback: we are thrown for a loop (caught within the various crisscrossing nets of deception that the film deploys) until we realize that the originally presented encounter was an elaborate act, performed as part of the lovers’ scheme. Retroactively, we can then assess the qualities of these mirrored encounters and marvel at the shades of difference these two pre-eminent actors bring to the scenes. Certainly, Owens and Roberts have their diegetic fans within the film itself: two field agents chuckle over a play-by-play recording of the scene, taking turns mimicking Owen’s poshness (“Eye oh-wnnn yewww,” they chortle to one another). We are also treated to a literal rehearsal of the encounter during yet another flashback. Owens and Roberts wend their way through a line run of the encounter that they’ll play out the next day: he, gently reminding her to enunciate in between sips of chardonnay (“Are you directing me?” she teases); she, reclining in bed and chiding him for engaging in the star privilege of script revision (“Wrong,” says she, correcting his improvisatory vulgarity, “It’s ‘people I’ve slept with’”).

And yet, neither of these two players realize that their dress rehearsal is being observed by a hidden audience. We track up into a light fixture in the ceiling, through its wiring, and emerge from a speaker placed on the desk of the foxy Tom Wilkinson, who chuckles appreciatively – paternally, even – at their snappy interplay. Aren’t these two Hollywood luminaries simply marvellous? The two actor-cum-directors remain unaware that their “show” has been very craftily stage managed until they attempt to reap the dividends from their treachery (as the camera tracks backward from the dazed couple in the final shot – leaving them to their entangled futures of mutual suspicion – Owen intones, “Well, at least we have each other.” Roberts, as usual, has the final word: “It really is that bad, isn’t it?”). Duplicity is rife with such moments, with actors stepping out from the rhythms of their own “numbers” in order to stand in as our analogues – admiring the playfulness of talented stars at work. In an era in which Hollywood so seldom provides us with opportunities for admiration, such intricacy is an occasion for dancing.

Summer viewing... 2008?!

As it's been a very busy last month, I haven't had much time at all to post anything new these last few weeks. I'd like to try to get back to a weekly schedule, but like the best laid plans of mice and men...

At any rate, as a way of making up for my lack of new postings, I thought I'd be a little perverse and offer some, well, older musings on films that I was watching last year between January and June. I know, I know... it's a little bit like cutting the mold off the edges of the mozzarella that expired a week ago but it's either that, or no pizza pie at all. Hope I'll be forgiven this once!

Thanks for your indulgence, and enjoy the penicillin...