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There must be an audience out there for a sad, mopey version of Maurice Sendak’s joyously fun Where the Wild Things Are, but I don’t know who they are.

With just ten sentences and a handful of beautiful artwork, Maurice Sendak made a timeless children’s tale in Where the Wild Things Are. Max, Mr. Sendak’s wolf costume-bedecked young hero, escapes a scolding mother to become king of a horde of monstrous-looking Wild Things until it’s time to go home again. And in those scant few pages, Max’s brief journey becomes a celebration of the essential wildness of a child’s imagination.

Adapting such a well-known and well-loved classic for the big screen is a challenge. Not only is the original book brief, it’s also very simple: Max causes a ruckus, Max is sent to his room, travels to a far-away jungle, parties with the Wild Things, then comes home. Then there’s the question of the Wild Things themselves, who are all chimeras that don’t look like anything found in nature. How best to bring them to life?

It’s fitting the task fell to director Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich), an adept fantasist with a keen eye for making the surreal seem plausible. Jonze teamed with writer Dave Eggers (Away We Go), a self-appointed biographer for the Gen-Y hipster set, to flesh out Max’s story. In the process, Jonze and Eggers added an almost overwhelming air of melancholy to an otherwise free-spirited story.

In the film as in the book, Max (Max Romero) is wild, but with some reason. His mother (Catherine Keener, one of many Jonze regulars in the film) is raising him and his sister alone and on a tight budget; it’s not clear if Max’s father has died or his parents are simply divorced. Max lashes out one night and after biting his mom he flees the house . . . and flees . . . until he comes to an ocean, and a boat. Max sets sail and eventually lands on an island populated by the Wild Things, who are as huge and menacing as they are childlike: when Max says he’s a king, they hand him a crown and follow his orders.

The Wild Things make for great playmates. They’re big and strong enough to knock down trees and jump dozens of feet at a time, but they’re subservient to Max and playful without being dangerous. At Max’s whim they set about building the “most perfect fort,” and what little boy doesn’t want one of those?

But there are complications. Sadness and jealousy haunt the Wild Things, and their crowning Max king smacks as much of desperation as anything else. Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) is especially volatile; while he quickly becomes Max’s closest friend, Carol’s damaged relationship with KW (voiced by Lauren Ambrose) juices the tension between all the Wild Things. A sense of loss, unavoidable and insurmountable, enters and eventually overtakes Max’s relationship with them.

As a metaphor for a child’s impotence in the face of pain and strife in his parent’s lives, the adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is serviceable. The movie maintains Max’s point of view throughout; the camera stays at his level and never looks down at him, and the very vagueness of all the relationship troubles accurately reflects how little (and how much) a child can understand something like divorce or grieving a death.

That sadness, however, is overbearing. Where the Wild Things Are the book is joyous in its craziness; the book’s Max is creative, wild, and a bit of a punk, but you like him anyway. The movie’s Max is surrounded by a persistent melancholy that chokes the life out of the story with great big blocks of sad dialogue. Perhaps that pain is useful for children dealing with something difficult. But it is not what anyone buying a ticket to Where the Wild Things Are wants.

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