Film Friday: Drag Me to Where the Wild Things Are

The long anticipated Spike Jonze-Dave Eggers adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are arrives in theaters this weekend, and Sam Raimi’s latest film Drag Me to Hell is newly out on DVD and Blu-Ray. I could be wrong, but I suspect the audiences for these two films overlap more than you might expect.

Where the Wild Things Are begins and ends in the real world of nine-year-old Max. The movie’s bookends, which taken together almost form a short film of their own, are wonderful. Following Max on a sleepy winter day, Jonze repeatedly cuts from a shot of his mother, or sister, or bedroom, or snow fort, back to the pre-adolescent face of the lead character, and the jump is often startling. Even when it’s not, it has the potential to be, since it’s Max’s face that gives meaning to the mundane details around him. To an adult, they’re everyday events. To a child, they’re the whole world, and his reaction is angry, crushed, impudent, bored, amused, embarrassed, all in the space of a few minutes. And the frequent return to his scraggly hair and big eyes somehow captures not only the feeling of being around a moody child but also the memory of being a moody child. Even adults who weren’t particularly sad kids, or whose childhoods weren’t at all like Max’s (busy single parent, busy older sibling), as mine wasn’t, would likely recognize days like this.

But Max has another world, too. After an emotional outburst, he sails on the open seas to an imaginary island populated by a handful of Wild Things, giant creatures whose personalities seem obliquely drawn from Max’s life. They share some of his own traits — they’re impulsive, forlorn—but they also seem to have the issues of his parents or maybe other adults. They want to eat him, or play with him, or first one and then the other. They have unexplained, deep-seated rifts that predate Max’s arrival, and they’re prone to a sadness that Max—though he’s crowned king of their world—cannot banish.

I appreciate what Jonze and Eggers, inspired by Maurice Sendak’s short book, are doing. The mood is purposely layered. The creatures have a history that Max and therefore the film’s audience don’t understand, and the film does not compromise its heavily melancholy tone just to lift our spirits.

But it’s also emotionally confusing. Its vague ideas are dense, but it finds no thread to connect them. The wonder of creation that inherently drives imaginary worlds, or even snow forts, is lacking in the mopey land of the Things. Their voices boom like voice-over narration instead of mingling with the sounds of the forest. And the tonal shifts, while I like them, sometimes rely almost solely on an acoustic pop soundtrack that feels like it’ll be dated tomorrow. But maybe I’d have said the same thing about Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller if I’d seen the film when it was new.

In all, it’s a disappointment, interesting as a psychological puzzle but one that’s eventually alienating not just to kids (I’m guessing) but even to an adult who wants to remember, trace, and understand those turbulent days of childhood, in part because of the childish imagery. During the romps, I almost felt like we were watching Teletubbies. Teletubbies who cry.

• * *

If I sailed to Sam Raimi’s personal island, I’d expect to see three Wild Things. One is the scrappy, visually inventive guy who worked with miniscule budgets to make weird and distinctive films like The Evil Dead 2 and Darkman. Then there’s the one who found his way into the Hollywood mainstream and made three competent Spider-Man movies in the style of big budget action films. And a third would be the guy who mades A Simple Plan, the dark psychological thriller about greed.

That last of those may be my favorite, but it’s the early films that bear the marks of Raimi’s unique style, and it’s a real kick to see him return to it with gusto. Drag Me to Hell is a delirious horror film, but it’s no trifle, for the sole reason that Raimi’s creativity suddenly seems reinvigorated, no longer bound by a comic book template. Each action sequence is a model of wit. You can almost hear Raimi laughing when his heroine, Christine, discovers that her assailant is standing conveniently beneath an anvil hung from the ceiling by a rope, or when a fierce fight in the interior of a car manages to incorporate both staples and dentures as weapons, or when a creature tries unsuccessfully to gum its victim’s face off because said dentures are at large, or when a possessed goat calls our heroine a bitch in exactly the way you’d expect a goat to speak: bi-ii-ii-ii-tch.

Clearly, this too is inspired by Maurice Sendak.

It’s the adult version of the same story, the mirror image. Don’t eat me, old woman. I have bank loans to close and clients to please. As a vegetarian who donates to the puppy shelter, I have no truck with your animal sacrifices. But, dear goat, don’t tempt me.

Max returns home from his imaginary world to loving arms, and Christine would like very much to do the same, except her Wild Things want to burn her, disembowel her, eat her up, drag her to hell. Played as pure entertainment, Raimi’s version could not be described as “group therapy with the muppets” as J. Hoberman said of Where the Wild Things Are, but perhaps Max’s creatures are sometimes as scary to him as these monsters are to Christine. His demons surface when his mom is fixing dinner for her date, and hers come out when she’s trying to make nice with her boyfriend’s parents, who don’t much like her. Maybe it’s the way she belches flies at their dinner table and screeches at unseen faces. Maybe they heard about the way she accidentally sneezed blood all over the loan officer’s desk, thus risking her promotion. These two worlds—the civil and the accursed—blend incongruously, at the absolute worst times.

Max’s mom can relate.

Robert Davis is Paste’s chief film critic. His column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Friday.