Moonrise Kingdom Review

Moonrise Kingdom (Review)

Since the bleakness of the Bush years, the doping scandals of Clemens and Armstrong, the near-death experience of Owen Wilson, the laughable shenanigans of Rick Perry, Texans living outside their state have few remaining sources of pride. Texans grasping for pride might cling to their “American by birth, Texan by the grace of God” bumper stickers. Others might turn up the volume to “God Blessed Texas” by the musically-small and generally obnoxious country quartet of “Little Texas.” And still a handful of us might point to Wes Anderson.

Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, may not be his funniest (that honor would belong to Bottle Rocket or Rushmore), but it is his most satisfying. The film draws on Anderson’s characteristic deadpan humor, but it achieves a charm and an emotional resonance lacking in earlier, zanier offerings.  

The film operates on a contrast between the precocity of two runaway children and the inanity of their elders. In this regard, Moonrise Kingdom follows Peter Pan, the Little Prince, and indeed his recent animated film The Fantastic Mr. Fox.  All throw into high relief the superiority of childlike naiveté over adult skepticism and cynicism. Moonrise’s two runaway children calmly negotiate the vicissitudes of the world, the whims of island weather and most of all the injustices imposed on them from soulless adults.

Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a kindred spirit to Rushmore’s Max, is an orphaned scout, a coon-skin cap wearing idealist, misunderstood by all but one—his kindred spirit Suzy (Kara Hayward). A cleverly-engineered flashback reveals that the two had met a year before during a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde. Sam and Suzy manage, long before the meretricious messaging of the internet or the cell phone, to achieve a meaningful connection through letter writing. They connect and decide to abscond into the island wilderness together to pursue adventure and perhaps the first tickles of amorous excitement.

Yet the relationship that emerges between the two is not spurred onward by the wild-eyed passion of Romeo and Juliet, but partakes of the calm assurance characteristic of couples that have spent half a century together. The wandering pair do not waste words or frolic in the exuberant cooing of young lovers. Their love is of the modest, not the loud sort. In one of the film’s more delightful scenes, Sam pierces Suzy’s ear with a fishhook and attaches a beetle to serve as an earring. In another, a makeshift scout wedding is arranged for the two.  Presiding over the ceremony is a renegade camp counselor, enacting a blood sharing ritual to foster their conjugal union. (He had expected to collect the funds of younger scouts but ultimately allows the newly-weds to keep the fifteen bucks or so.) 

The crew of adults, acted out by the likes of Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, and Frances McDormand, cannot seem to find the same inner equanimity of the supposedly “disturbed youth.” Murray is no great surprise to fans of Anderson’s previous movies, and he delivers a competent performance as Suzy’s laughably irascible father, a comical senex iratus lacking any appreciation for his daughter’s independence, let alone her romantic escapades. The real highlight for many will be the casting of Die Hard action superhero Bruce Willis. Willis has clearly aged; he is still bald, but he has lost the vigor of the actor who used to yawp “yippee kayee MotherF##” and hurtle forth from explosions. He plays a soft-spoken island sheriff carrying on a quiet affair with Murray’s wife (McDormand). One of the more moving scenes in the film involves his adopting of Sam the orphan (Sam becomes at film’s end a kind of junior island sheriff). Other casting highlights include Tilda Swinton as a callous social worker bent on institutionalizing Sam and Edward Norton as an intensely likeable and large-hearted scout leader.  

Islands are of course particularly conducive to escapes from “reality” and its tedious strictures. The escape in Moonrise Kingdom is both temporal (the film is set in 1965 but the island seems hardly touched by modern progress of any sort) and geographic (a fictional island off the coast of New England called New Penzance). One of Anderson’s great successes here is the cinematographic journey across this fair isle. Scene after scene is animated with gorgeous island images -- golden fields kissed by the wind, craggy coastline sprayed by seawater, forests of elms rolling over soft hills. The natural beauty of the island complements the natural innocence of the young lovers.

Anderson’s deadpan humor remains a constant, but Moonrise Kingdom’s real achievement is the careful balance it strikes between comic charm and dramatic heft. This dramatic depth separates Moonrise from Anderson’s earlier work. A film like The Life Aquatic is rich in charming eccentricities, quotable lines, and even comic mock violence, but it does not approach Moonrise’s poignancy.  The real reason for this poignancy is Sam, who is at once the most vulnerable and the most likeable of all Anderson’s characters. Part Oliver Twist, part Max from Rushmore, Sam rejects the hollow conventions of scouthood and civilization and seeks time together with the one person who seems to understand him. 

Moonrise Kingdom is an important step forward for Wes Anderson, and it is exciting to think about what intelligent and offbeat escapist fantasies are stirring still in his rich imagination.