Movies that promise to make you feel like a kid again tend to overlook how miserable childhood can be.
Your friends and siblings might be mean. Your parents, especially if they're divorced, may feel absent. Your emotions routinely run riot. And the world often seems completely out of your control. If being a kid is so much fun, why is it we all can't wait to grow up?
So when I say that Where the Wild Things Are, director Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's literary classic, breathlessly captures the turmoil and confusion of being nine years old, consider it as much a caution as a compliment.
This isn't a zany, faux-heartwarming slapstick comedy with adorable creatures and a plucky youngster at the centre.
It isn't the usual Hollywood affirmation of childish, selfish qualities, but a repudiation of them.
It is sometimes harrowing, often dour and, for young children, possibly unsettling. In many ways, it feels like a movie, not for kids, but for the hipster parents who grew up on the beloved source material.
But there is this: the movie is also a marvel of inventiveness, visual acuity and frank, fresh performances.
As audacious experiments go, it is a flawed one, but unforgettably so.
Newcomer Max Records stars as Max, an energetic boy who feels misunderstood and neglected -- by his unavailable father, by his loving but stressed single mother (Catherine Keener) and even by his older sister, who has friends of her own now.
After a fight with his mother, Max flees the family home -- a departure from the book, in which he was merely sent to bed without supper and dreamed up the world of the wild things -- until finding a sailboat that he uses to head out to sea.
He eventually finds himself on an island (actually locations on the Australian coast) populated by strange, enormous beasts.
Like him, their emotions are unchecked and their behaviour can be volatile, even dangerous. Yet, like Max, all they truly crave is attention -- and direction.
There's KW (Lauren Ambrose), the loner of the group, feathered sensible Douglas (Chris Cooper), self-proclaimed "downer" Judith (Catherine O'Hara), humble Ira (Forest Whitaker) and Alexander (Paul Dano) who feels ignored because of his size.
But the wild thing Max bonds with most is Carol (James Gandolfini), a tender brute as prone to bursting into tears as flying into a fit of rage.
Clearly, each of the characters are a manifestation of Max's own hopes, fears and desires, and his time in this imagined realm is more about healing than escaping.
Problematically, though, this means the film itself never generates much momentum.
Once Max is anointed the new king of the wild things (apparently they ate all the previous leaders), the story consists of building forts, dirt fights and family feuds between wild things.
While that's faithful to the slightness of the source material, the absence of a cookie-cutter plot may leave some audiences feeling like this fantasy isn't wild enough.
For the rest of us, though, it's a welcome and worthwhile flight from the norm.
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