If it is possible to win an Oscar for the first twenty minutes of a movie, then Where the Wild Things Are has this year’s honor sewed up.  For twenty minutes, Spike Jonze has made the most painfully real portrait of a normal flawed relationship between a parent and a child that I’ve seen in a long time.  Unsentimental and honest, Catherine Keener and newcomer Max Records play mother and son with such intense realism that I was shaken thinking about the ways that good parents and good kids can still damage each other just by the virtue of being human beings so connected that there is no way not to chafe at the proximity.

Where the Wild Things Are is overall a film about the difficulties of being a child.  The raw emotions.  The painful need to confront the injustice of the world.  The uncertainty of being completely reliant on adults who you slowly realize are just people like yourself.  All of this hits home powerfully in the introductory scenes between Keener and Records.

But as everyone who’s ever been child (and therefore been handed a copy of the classic children’s book at birth) knows, the story is really about the surreal and magical time spent with the Wild Things.  There is a potent touch of danger and malice mixed in with Maurice Sendak’s whimsy.

In the movie, Max runs away from home, gets in his boat and sails to the island where the wild things are.  And that’s where the movie falls apart.  Jonze makes a valiant effort at imbuing the giant puppets that look wonderfully just like the book illustrations with personalities and life.  He is a unique filmmaker and the movie is imminently watchable.  Fascinating in the effort.  Though a bit unfortunately like watching a really well done student film that wears its themes on its sleeves and doesn’t quite tell a compelling story.

It is not even that there are missteps in the narrative, save for one strange interlude where one of the wild things introduces two wordless and fake-looking owls as wise friends.  But it is intentionally episodic and rambling.  None of this is surprising given the brevity of the source material, but having to say that is nothing more than an excuse for not making a complete movie.

This is probably a good place for me to place myself in the camp that this is not really a kids movie either.  Yeah, I’ve read the interviews with Sendak that essentially say that kids should suck it up and not be coddled in their entertainment.  I get that maybe kids movies these days are a bit predictable and tidy and therefore cheat children of a transformative film experience.  But I also remember being scarred by Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (with Gene Wilder) which was surreal and creepy.  I was not mentally prepared to process it.  And I think my kids would have the same problem with Where the Wild Things Are.  It is soaked in ennui and melancholy.  Every character and giant puppet is having an existential crisis.  It is very hard to come to grips with mortality as a child — and I don’t think kids need a movie that rubs it in their faces.

In his few films so far, Jonze has proven that he is not going to be predictable.  Being John Malkovich and Adaptation were both narratively and visually unique.  Both of those films were written by Charlie Kaufman.  In the past, I’ve given more credit to the writer than the director for those two successes, but I think that was unfair.  (And Kaufman’s huge mess of a writer-director effort on Synechdoche, New York confirmed this for me.)  And I’ll say that Jonze probably did a better job with Where the Wild Things Are than should have been expected.  It would have been a huge disappointment if it had been CGI’d and script doctored to make the kid cuter and the wild things into anodyne buddies.  But I suppose it is faint praise to say the film was less disappointing than it could have been.

Watching the credits at the end, after a very brief return to the brilliance of Keener and Records sitting in silence at the dining room table, what I really wanted was for Jonze to make a straight-up family drama for his next film.  I think he’s ready to drop the plot gimmicks that have marked his work and just tackle head on a story about real people dealing with real life.  Not much of a high concept pitch, but I’d go see it.