Spike Jonze’s big-screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where The Wild Things Are has rekindled a debate that’s raged around Sendak’s work for decades: What’s appropriate for children? And at what age? Any kid who’s used to going to the movies should find a lot to engage them in the Where The Wild Things Are movie, particularly in all the scenes of big furry creatures romping destructively around the woods. But Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers certainly don’t spare the psychodrama. When rebellious kid Max sails to the island of The Wild Things, he finds that they’re a lot like the children and grown-ups he left behind: petulant, passive-aggressive, quick-tempered and jealous. For all the fun of watching odd-looking Sendak beasts bound about, Where The Wild Things Are is far more gut-wrenching than joyous, and it’s almost impossible to say whether many actual kids will like it.
But some will. And it’s in reaching out to that particular some that Sendak long ago found a living.
Beginning in 2003, Jonze and his frequent collaborator Lance Bangs began taping a series of interviews with the octogenarian Sendak at his home, listening (and sometimes prodding) as Sendak recalled his boyhood, his early career, the phenomena and controversies of Wild Things and In The Night Kitchen, and what it was like to live as a gay man at a time when going public with his sexuality might’ve ended his career. Sendak is a natural performer in front of the camera, and a man of contradictions. In one interview, he makes an offhand comment that he hates his family, yet in another he points out the touching dedication to his parents in In The Night Kitchen, and in still another he talks about his love for his older brother, who worked on art with him, and with whom he designed handmade wooden toys with moving parts. Sendak says that when he wrote and drew Wild Things, he wanted to get across that, “Mothers and children are human beings, and they will sometimes do the wrong thing.” In Tell Them Anything You Want, Bangs and Jonze get across that a man looking back on his life can view it kindly and sadly on different days, because that's the way people are. Anyone can turn sour at a moment’s notice.
Bangs and Jonze accomplish this subtly, through the very structure of the documentary, which jumps abruptly from interview to interview, while keeping Sendak’s stories intact and coherent. The movie plays like one 40-minute conversation—which it sort of is, only stretched out over several years. The conversation wanders freely whenever Sendak needs to digress, but it always circles back. Sendak pines for his brother at one point, and then towards the end of Tell Them, when asked what he’d still like to accomplish, Sendak says, “I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly… and I want it to be for my brother.” Early in the documentary Sendak talks about how he would stare out his apartment window as a boy and watch other children play, which Bangs and Jonze silently recall in Tell Them Anything You Want’s final image: an illustration from a Sendak book that shows a boy peering out a window.