Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are” feels like a smart kids movie from the early 1980s, like “Time Bandits” or “The Dark Crystal”, featuring actors or puppeteers using real costumes to make fantastic worlds solid. “Wild Things” crunches, thumps, stomps, crackles, booms and rumbles with physicality that CGI-heavy movies can’t match. Jonze doesn’t show off the colorful wizardry of “Harry Potter”, but then again there’s nothing in ‘Potter’ half as fun as the dirt-clod fight waged by Max and his pals or the tree-splitting roughhousing among monsters who somehow seem as heavy as planets and soft as pillows. Jonze captures a nine-year old boy’s delight in experiencing the world almost entirely through his senses. Max isn’t having fun unless he’s getting smacked with a snowball, careening through a forest, or piled on by gleeful monsters. Jonze has a marvelous feel for the way boys delight in crashing through the world like pinballs.

The physicality is only one truth “Where The Wild Things Are” gets right, though. Psychological truths, however mysterious they are to Max, are of course the real subject of the movie. They are written on the faces of the Wild Things and resonate in their voices (excellent dub work all around, led by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, and Chris Cooper). Each creature has a rich inner life, and mostly it’s in their eyes. Jonze used computers to enliven the faces of the Wild Things, most prominently in the emotional expressive faces of Carol and K.W., the ex-companions (it’s probably inaccurate to call them lovers, exactly). The story of the Wild Things remains a mystery—Max never does find out what their history is, as a tribe or as individuals—but their faces cannot hide a hazy past of anxiety, sorrow, and loss. There isn’t one of them whose face doesn’t melt into muted sadness at the slightest provocation. One of the triumphs of the movie is how Jonze lets us observe Max watching the faces of the adults as well as the monsters. He studies them for clues, like a detective, which is precisely how an intelligent, empathic young boy studies the adults around him. Max Records, as ready for a lullaby as he is a riot, was perfectly cast. A gifted child actor, he flawlessly embodies the heart of the movie in his searching moodiness and his ruffled tenderness.

Of course, the Wild Things are inventions of Max’s, so it’s not surprising that the faces of Carol and K.W., the principle objects of his affection, are obviously variations on his mother’s (Catherine Keener). Theirs are loving expressions, but tinged with sadness; the steepling eyebrows are heartbreakingly emotive, and they are definitely meant to evoke Keener’s. Max studies her face twice in the movie, once when he lays at her feet, watching her type on her computer while he tells his vampire story, and once when he’s back home, watching her fall asleep after waiting up for him to come home. Jonze conveys that Max registers her feelings like a seismograph. Even though she’s onscreen for only a few minutes, Keener is really in every scene in the movie because Max’s imagination mirrors his emotional rapport with his mother. Running away from home is merely a change of scenery for his overwhelming love for her. The smile that appears on Max’s face as the film ends is one of relief at the sight of Keener’s face relaxing into rest, knowing that the temporary oblivion of sleep is the only moment of relief his mother has.

Because his love for her informs everything, the Wild Things’ rumpus is never more than a series of half-hearted, inconclusive frolics. This is the strangest quality of “Where The Wild Things Are”. Whereas Maurice Sendak’s book was psychologically true for almost all nine-year old boys, Jonze’s adaptation is psychologically true for only one boy, in one particular set of circumstances. You’d expect that the dominant emotion of a movie like “Where The Wild Things Are” would be a feeling of intense freedom, however illusory or bounded by rules. Instead it’s fear. Max is on a rollercoaster, peaking with the ecstasy of liberation one moment, bottoming out in worry the next. He destroys his sister’s room and a gift he made for her, but a minute later he burns with repentance. The same ebb and flow is true for his relations with other people (and the Wild Things). The joyful abandonment of playtime always cracks suddenly, without warning, and his companions are scattered by a gloomy wind. Dimly aware of this incessant oscillation, Max plays under a dark cloud, a distant brooding fear that in a moment the fun will vanish.

In other words, Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are” is about the loneliness of a nine-year old boy living through the aftermath of a divorce. Max’s fantasy life reflects his terror at the instability of family relationships. What he wants is one big happy family, all heaped together in love. He’s smarter than that, though. His deeper intelligence won’t let his imagination quite run away with things, no matter how much he wants it. It is not a story of escape but of resignation and surrender, as is clearly seen in his non-reconciliation with Carol. Indeed, Jonze seems to have made a great film about boyhood until you realize how little of true boyhood there is in Max. “Where The Wild Things Are” is actually a tale of poisoned childhood, a kid prematurely infected by the anxieties of adults. It is true, achingly beautiful at times, and unique in the way it compassionately and imaginatively portrays the impact of divorce on a sensitive, intelligent, lonesome boy. Perhaps it has much to tell us about family life in our time.