Max's age changes the tone and ultimately ruins
the movie. The book is about a kid little enough to throw a tantrum for a while and then come back to reality. A kid little enough to still find aunts and uncles (whom the wild things were based on) scary. Since they couldn't find a suitable kid in the right age range (I'd say 7 at the oldest, look at the kids who read the book for the first time) the writers had to invent all that superfluous crap about familial neglect in order to cast Max's behavior as a coping strategy rather than a tantrum. Max, as Jonze/Eggers write him, is filled with angst--which is just not something that small children have. Teens, yes. Loads of it. But not small children. And in turn, the monsters become bigger basket-cases than Woody Allen at his best, rather than simple manifestations of "unfamiliar is scary" that small children are very good at--as they are in the book. Would casting younger have made for a better movie? I think so. Or maybe there's just too much angst in the script for it to be salvaged either way.
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