What Wes Anderson movie isn’t about misfits who construct their own plans and build a world outside of conventional society? From his debut oddball heist tale Bottle Rockets through the outsider’s anthem of Rushmore, the Glass Family eccentricities of The Royal Tenenbaums through the undersea escapism of Steve Zissou in The Life Aquatic, it’s all about worlds inhabited by characters who can’t confront reality contained in worlds constructed by a director who similarly jerry-rigs reality.
His latest, Moonrise Kingdom, is no exception. Gorgeous, lyrical, yet about as deep and probing as a 10-year-old’s Hardy Boys mystery, it follows two misfit kids — Khaki Scout and orphan Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) — who become soulmates and abandon their claustrophobic lives and families to trek through the woods of New Penzance Island off the New England coast. They are like Romeo and Juliet, or Adam and Eve set loose in Eden (if Romeo or Adam occasionally wet the bed).
Sam is one of Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola’s prototypical creations: precocious, romantic, nerdy, ridiculous yet somehow dignified. Pretty much all Wes Anderson “heroes” rolled into one, in other words. With his corncob pipe and beaver cap, he inducts Suzy into the intricacies of male solitude — surviving in the woods — while she instructs him in the pleasures of female company — reading kid’s adventure tales to him by the campfire, and occasionally cavorting on the beach in their underwear.
Sam is an outsider whose drawing abilities and musing nature (and orphanhood) mark him as a target for bullying and prejudice — the real, adult world, in other words. He bonds with Suzy backstage, where she’s dressed as a crow for a local church production of “Noey’s Fludde” (foreshadowing the inclement weather to come), and they agree to meet in a field near the woods to start their forest trek. Suzy is similarly estranged; she has three younger brothers and two lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDermond, who is having an affair with local cop Bruce Willis, a fact that makes Suzy smolder with inner rage). With her blue mascara and portable record player, she’s the hipster girlfriend you wish you had when you were 10.
Smartly set in the past (1965, to be precise), Moonrise Kingdom avoids our modern era’s irony and sarcasm and focuses on a time when kids were meant to act a certain way. If not, they were ostracized or — worse — given a few rounds of electroshock therapy.
The arch Native American-themed pop songs and Mark Mothersbaugh score tell us that Sam and Suzy are embarked on a kind of back-to-nature, “primitive” mission. They wear flowers in their hair, gaze at one another across a rocky inlet before plunging in together, and perform symbolic sexual rites. They consider themselves “married.”
In the hands of a more adult director like Peter Weir (or even Nicholas Roeg), this material would have an eerie, primal resonance. In Wes Anderson’s hands, well, it becomes a Wes Anderson movie. It’s beautiful to look at, particularly the opening interior shots of the Bishop home, with the camera tracking each floor and room in detail, framed in symmetrical shots that highlight the isolation of family members from one another. Anderson and cinematographer Robert Yeoman have fun creating color-saturated environments and characters — like Sam’s foster parents’ yellow kitchen, or the rich amber tones of nature, or social worker Tilda Swinton’s ominous blue cape.
The young actors, as you might expect, are awesome. All the kids of the Khaki Scout troop under Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton), in fact, make Moonrise Kingdom much more special than it would be if it was just about adults. Reviewers have spoken of the “rapt” quality of the film, but this same “rapt” quality, I suspect, would get knocked for being stylized and pretentious if this were another Anderson movie about adults, such as Darjeeling Limited. It gets a pass, maybe, because it’s about kids, and how they relate, and escape the rules of adulthood for as long as they can.
Ironically, Anderson’s prior release was an animated kid’s movie that had a more adult viewpoint. The Fantastic Mr. Fox was magical in its own way, but had a knowing, adult feel to its characters’ language and idiosyncrasies. Moonrise Kingdom is more meditative and allows the kids to be kids, albeit precocious kids.
Wes Anderson is a kind of national American treasure. No one else makes movies like him, and by definition, that makes him a precious resource. Circle that word “precious” because it — along with “twee” — perfectly describes Anderson’s aesthetic. As always, he invites you to admire the intricacy and detail of the carefully constructed dioramas he’s built, populated by people who speak in the stylized manner of paper cutout people (with matching dry wit), and applaud it, not as reality, but as somehow more sacred than reality. It’s a carefully “curated” world (and God, how I loathe that word’s migration outside of art galleries and into everyday usage), because young people today like to curate their lives to a fault, and have been encouraged to do so by the virtual dioramas of their social networking sites. Of course, such dedicated curation can at times leave one ill-prepared to face the actual world outside of the diorama.