Sundance Diary: Spike Jonze's 'I'm Here'

Sundance Film Festival

Spike Jonze's short I'm Here is more satisfying than his recent feature Where The Wild Things Are.

by Ella Taylor

What with the Internet and YouTube and all, the short film, once the second-class citizen of film festivals, is coming (back) into its own.

Technically anyone can do it, and these days, practically everyone does. That mixed blessing deserves a longer discussion, but what does it mean for the future of movies that a short film by a famous director is better than the well-received but ponderous kids' movie he made for the Christmas blockbuster season? Not much in the immediate future, perhaps, and anyway, Spike Jonze's idea of a short — 28 minutes, though he had planned five, the preppy-looking Jonze shyly told an enthusiastic public audience on opening night — may be more elastic than some.

Say what you like about the fact that it was funded by Absolut Vodka and is to some degree a commercial for the company, I'm Here is a wonderfully weird romance between two robot outsiders (Britain's Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory) cobbled together from plastic and old mechanical parts. Jonze takes literally, though with tongue firmly embedded in cheek, the question of whether you'd give your arm — and more — for someone you love. Horrifyingly funny and wistfully sweet, I'm Here is a thousand times more engaging, at a fraction of the cost, than Where the Wild Things Are, whose characters plodded around in funny suits, quite forgetting that author Maurice Sendak always wrote about how delicious, as well as scary, are the horrors and rages of childhood.