Spike Jonze's new film, Where the Wild Things Are, introduces its young protagonist, Max, with a scream. The 9-year-old boy proceeds to somersault down the stairs in hot pursuit of his pet dog. (Or was it a cat? It doesn't really matter.) The point is that Max is a hellion, until he's not. One second a brat, the other a sensitive and lonely child, Max is boyhood incarnate.

But in Jonze's respectful adaptation of Maurice Sendak's children's book, Max is also civilization incarnate, and the land of the Wild Things is at once alien and familiar. The creatures fight, make up, hold grudges, feel bad, and generally act like the people you know. When Max arrives and declares himself king to avoid being eaten, jubilation ensues, followed by a period of peace and unprecedented development in the primitive habitat.

Strife, of course, eventually returns to the island. After all, Max is no king, and the Wild Things are like children themselves. Some are mopey, others manipulative, and at least one is as imaginative as Max. But none of them, Max included, can "keep the sadness out," as one of the Wild Things asks him to when he arrives.

Sendak's book is only 10 sentences long, and while those sentences brilliantly convey the story of Max's journey, they can't do what a feature-length film can. On the other hand, a feature-length film might easily miss the mark of such a perfectly tight little story by trying to make more of it than it should be. Jonze's film manages to stay within the lines of the original text, but he also expands them very gently to make Where the Wild Things Are something more.

It is not an overt political allegory, nor does it represent a specific agenda. That would be too easy, and surely a less creative director might have succumbed to such a temptation. Instead, the film transports the adult mind back to childhood, to a world where anything is possible and feelings dictate reality. And I, for one, left the theater seeing more of a connection between that world -- with all its wonder and pain -- and the adult world I now inhabit than I'd ever seen before.

[Image: Warner Bros. Studios via aceshowbiz.com]