A few months ago, a conservative politician callously derided a liberal bill, claiming that its “empathy” was just a slippery slope to partisanship. One does not need to be partisan—or even political—to realize that empathy is the last bastion of civilized thought. If empathy becomes a “partisan” issue, rather than something generally recognized for its social utility, then we’ll all be riding that slippery slope down the garbage chute. Fostering empathy may be one of art’s richest and most important faculties, but, as with life, empathy is but one ingredient in artistry’s stew. Empathy without rationality can make hearts bleed like burst pipes, and it’s not impossible to drown in that briny, bleary mess.

But, allow me to dismount my high horse of metaphorical grandiosity, and explain how my sermon relates to Where the Wild Things Are. Before lapsing into my own belletrism, I was prepared to quote the French film critic André Bazin, who said that “To explain [Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio] De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love … [T]he affection De Sica feels for his creatures is no threat to them … There is no admixture of pity in it … because pity does violence to the dignity of the man who is its object”—because I think the same could be said of director Spike Jonze’s treatment of the characters in Wild Things. But one should also consult American critic James Agee, who, three months after publishing a florid rave of De Sica’s Shoeshine (1947), retracted his evaluation. He ascribed his enthusiasm to the fact that the movie was “made from the heart, and so touched the heart”; its intimacy had allowed him to overlook what he later perceived as flaws.

I’m leery of overloading Wild Things, because it’s a film for which the anticipation has become wilder than the final cut. At best, the movie will become a beloved black sheep among kids’ classics. By his own admission, the director “didn’t set out to make a children’s film … [but] to represent, as honestly as possible, what it feels like to be a person trying to understand the world when you’re that age”; yet what he’s come up with isn’t really a children’s film, or a children’s movie for adults, or an adult movie for children. A wave of controversy has splashed against the protean nature of Wild Things—its lack of conventional narrative, plot goals, and even rainbow-bright sheen has kept financiers on edge. You almost feel you’re on the side of corrupt, literal-minded, dishonest, pedantic adulthood if sugar, spice and everything nice don’t gestate in your heart while the tale unfolds onscreen. (Some have argued that the filmmakers’ playful abstention from structure is like the work of John Cassavetes. What kid doesn’t clamor to see A Woman Under the Influence?) If you don’t react to the movie, you fear you’ve become an apostate poo-pooer on the concept of the inviolable artist—even if these particular artists cost their studio-patron something in the vicinity of $100 million. Well, I may be corrupt, but I’m hardly an adult; I feel affectionate toward Wild Things, but this is a movie to hug, not to make love to.

Of course not, you say; that’s cinematic pedophilia! Sure, sure—but I still think Wild Things falls short of greatness, and not because it’s a “children’s film.” Wonder and confusion and melancholy are indeed elements of youth, but so are excitement and silliness and an absence of limitations. Jonze’s venerated ability to merge “the realistic and the banal … with the fantastic and the extreme” is a touch too close to banal here; his deadpan was key in his Charlie Kaufman collaborations (in his other two features, he rejoiced in Being John Malkovich and the throes of Adaptation), but Wild Things is too understated. The movie failed to excite my senses; it lacked the tonic qualities of art which made Jonze’s other films so fun, and a select few kiddie pics scintillating. The Fall—directed by Tarsem, another music-video maker—was also made with love and empathy, and even a dollop of sentimentality; but Tarsem let the wild things loose, and embraced the sort of indulgences that captivated us as kids, and still captivate us as “adults.” This summer’s Ponyo was as squishily innocent as Wild Things, yet it had pep and spunk bursting from its gills; you felt its goofballs come at you like curve balls. Wild Things is heartfelt but tentative. The scriptwriters (Jonze co-wrote the film with novelist Dave Eggers) seem to have reverted too far into childhood; emotionally, the movie is about as outgoing as a reserved little tyke of the glasses-braces-pimples variety—charming, but turbid, too.

The plot isn’t much more expansive than Maurice Sendak’s iconic picture book, a bedtime perennial since 1963—when it was deemed shockingly outré for having its hero sentenced to bed without supper. It’s not so shocking anymore; in the movie, Mother is single, and played appositely by Catherine Keener in her characteristic befuddled-sweetheart manner. And this time Max is a runaway—a bratty loner who’s blind to the suffering of his burdened mother and peer-pressurized teen sister (Pepita Emmerichs). He leaps over the Twilight Zone and onto the isle of the wild things, which, like the movie, are less wild than mild; the whole colony is in need of group therapy. One gathers, though, that these mammoth woolies are all in Max’s head: an embodied moral lesson, charmingly disguised by Jonze and Eggers. Max inveigles the neurotics into crowning him their king, but as every politician realizes, you can’t please everybody; staving off sorrow is the first campaign promise he breaks. Max must learn to be empathic, to be a parent, to grow up. This is where Jonze’s De Sica reflex kicks in, and in which, the movie delivers its humble largesse: Max’s rich imagination doesn’t place him on a pedestal. The filmmakers are like loving parents who don’t want to spoil their boy because they want to see him grow up right. Their Wizard of Oz is dry-eyed, their yellow-brick road a shade more ocher. When the wild things discover that Max is no less flawed than they are, they discern he’s merely “normal”—like them. He just can’t wait to be king, but Jonze and Eggers and Sendak have a vision that’s the opposite of autocratic.

Their storyline can be read in two ways. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the little señorita escapes her cruel existence by dreaming her troubles away; in the end, her dreamworld is all she’s got, but at least it’s an alternative. For Max, the Freudian id-land is hardly an alternative—it’s an allegory. For this reason, at least one critic read defeatism into Wild Things. Depending on your bent, I suppose, the film’s outlook is either realistic or depressive. But I think it’s less a question of one camp being right, and more a manifestation of the filmmakers’ own confusion. “It’s a movie that takes kids seriously,” says Jonze to Creative Screenwriting—but must kids be taken so solemnly? Max is like a dull doppelgänger of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. The comic-strip kid had an imagination fed on monsters, as well as superheroes, space aliens, and detective stories. And then there was that zinger, the Choose-Your-Adventure philosophical underpinnings that placed the cartoon in that playful, liminal netherworld between physical youth and intellectual maturity. Max’s imagination is fueled more by psychology than philosophy. That’s one of many mature fruits that the filmmakers didn’t squeeze. But I wish they had: They could use the juice.

What they do have, however, is commendable. The young actor who plays Max has a name better suited for a rapper’s music company than a child star, but he has the flush cheeks of a frustrated monarch, and a matching pair of eyes that mutter the curses his mouth is too shy to emit. As the wild things, James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano, Lauren Ambrose, and Chris Cooper give their Muppets sensibilities as distinctive as Kermit’s and Miss Piggy’s. Lance Acord, Jonze’s long-time cinematographer, has helped to give the movie a consistent style that’s crisp like a fall afternoon; the handsome, stark clarity of the images allies beautifully to Jonze’s tough-love generosity. The soundtrack, however, by Karen O (the Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeah!), is a little too sylvan at times: like Yoko Ono frolicking through a glade. But the wild things themselves are a sartorial feat—giant, mottled, bowlegged beasts with costumed trunks and convincingly animated faces. Compared to these chimeric mutts, Max is the size of a teddy bear. The effect is dreamlike: Children would love it if their stuffed animals could hug them back; these velveteen rabbits can even hold them.

What bothers me most cannot be attributed to the movie itself, but rather to how it is framed; its publicity has the odiferous air of Peter Panhandling. In a recent New York Times Magazine feature, Saki Knafo adopts a mawkish posture that the movie has the dignity not to take. He observes that: “Although [Jonze] has no children of his own, his feeling for what it’s like to be a child seems to be stronger and more immediate than that of most people his age, and children are often drawn to him.” That may be true, but must Knafo infantilize Jonze’s artistry by reducing it to “attitude”? “An implicit question,” Knafo claims, “precedes [Jonze’s] artistic choices: Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?” It’s as if the Quentin Tarantino analysis got misplaced in the Jonze file. That query may apply to the director’s music videos, but it is the opposite of an artistic choice when it comes to features. Music videos are great testbeds for technique and can be very fun to watch; they are short enough that to get by on hip glamour and mood-induction alone. But, in regard to mainstream pop music, at least, they aren’t to features what short stories and poems are to novels; a better analogy would be commercials to T.V. shows.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ?” probably lurks in the back of Jonze’s mind, as it does in any good experimenter’s. But I doubt it takes precedence over other concerns. “I always like the idea that the characters are making the movie you’re watching,” says the director. “I try to be more invisible.” That’s closer to the De Sica spirit of Wild Things, and the ebullience of Malkovich and Adaptation. So why this callow “cool” talk? It relates less to the movie than it does to the movie’s ad campaign. According to Fast Company, “the film has become something of a watershed for marketing to the tight-jeans, nerd-glasses set. Witness the current ads running for the film, which [feature] gauzy cinematography and a track by Arcade Fire.” Aha! When the trailer ran in theaters—with cutesy, hand-drawn titles proclaiming the holy matrimony of Jonze, Eggers, Sendak, and O—you could almost hear those nerd glasses slide down the trendsetters’ noses, nearly to the point of falling down their plaid shirts and on to their recently wetted laps. They probably Tweeted themselves in the middle of the theater. I don’t think Knafo is a shill for Warner Brothers, but all this shallow talk of coolness must have given the studio execs their own wet dreams—even if the discourse is condescending to the filmmakers, and ravages the movie’s best virtue: its unsentimental innocence.

Of course, when you get in the range of $100 million, you’ve got to stay afloat somehow—and I do hope the picture does. I can even excuse the fatuous claim that the movie is “based on one of the most beloved books of all time.” (It’s nestled between The Bhagavad Gita and The Fountainhead.) But the movie never goes soft on Max; it tells him flat-out that he can’t remain on a dreamy island unto himself forever—he has to grow up. And yet here come the marketers, selling toys to grown-ups—“sophisticated,” “trendy” “adults.” Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, though made with conviction, was a blue-light special for hipsters, too—but at least it was about the shoppers’ coevals, and didn’t accessorize. Unless bohos aspire to end up like hobos, I hope they know better than to splurge on fanged jewelery and coats made from the fur of imaginary beasts, even if it is on sale at Urban Outfitters. (It’s an apter venue than Wal-Mart, which is my generation’s never-never land for other reasons…) These merchandising tactics are like a Taking Woodstock nostalgia trip for the sentimental young. Peter Panhandling, allow me to introduce Peter Pandering.