Wes Anderson is a director you either hate or love. His meticulously framed and designed sets with either warm your little OCD heart, or make you roll your eyes at the cutsie-wootsieness of it all. His deadpan, funny-because-it's-overly-earnest humor will make you smirk and chuckle, or make you ask "Why is this funny?"
Those of you who don't care for Wes Anderson: I get it. He's a director with a specific vision, and if that vision, or the way he expresses it, doesn't appeal to you, that's totally cool. But this review isn't for you.
Because, to me, Wes Anderson is one of the greatest living directors and Moonrise Kingdom, his latest exploration of innocence and connection, is a swoony fantasy and his best film since The Royal Tenenbaums.
Anderson tugs at the heartstrings in a subtle, barely perceptible way. In The Life Aquatic, when Steve Zissou and his crew take his submarine to find the creature that killed his best friend, and he finally comes face to face with the behemoth, I got choked up. In so many ways, The Life Aquatic is a silly movie about fantastical undersea creatures and a narcissistic Jacques Cousteau-like character out to find the shark that ate his friend. But damn, it has some poignant moments that come out of nowhere.
Rushmore, though more obviously melancholy, is similar. Beneath the sarcastic, anti-humor humor ("These are O.R. scrubs." "Oh. Are they?") is a really moving story about an outsider trying to deal with the death of his mother, first love, and finding his place in the world.
Moonrise Kingdom is on par with the longing tone of Rushmore. It's about an orphan, Sam Shakusky (imagine a 12 year old, outdoorsy Max Fischer), who escapes his troop of Khaki Scouts on the isolated New Penzance island in 1965. Sam has a plan to run away with local girl, Suzy Bishop, who dresses like a French chanteuse even though she's actually an American preteen who loves library books.
Sam and Suzy only make it so far before the grown-ups in their lives--Suzy's parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray), the local chief of police (Bruce Willis), and the earnest Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton), as well as a group of surprisingly violent Khaki Scouts--start to search high and low for them. All Suzy and Sam want to do is kiss and dance to French pop music on the beach, but they are inevitably dragged back into the real, and far less appealing, world by parents and guardians who just don't understand.
As usual, Anderson builds the movie to look like a dollhouse, with hundreds of tiny details in each frame, and with each shot perfectly centered. This is especially true during the scenes at Suzy's house: the orderly shots highlight the emotional chaos roiling underneath. The colors are exquisite and the costumes (at least Suzy's collared dresses and Sam's badge-bedecked scout uniform) are wonderful. Anyone familiar with Anderson's films knows he's as much a creator of fantastic worlds as George Lucas or Peter Jackson. Instead of creating Middle Earth or Endor, Anderson creates New Penzance Island. And for my money, I'd rather live on New Penzance.
Underneath Suzy and Sam's struggles to be together and to find their place in the world (they're both described as "troubled" by the adults around them), is a levity and optimism that is common in Anderson films. Things tend to work themselves out in the end in Anderson's tidy universes, and so although we feel genuine fear for Suzy and Sam, we also know that they'll be ok.
I think my favorite moment in Moonrise Kingdom is when Sam warns Suzy that he might wet the bed while they share a tent. He says, "I don't want you to be offended." Suzy takes his hand and says tenderly, "I would never be offended." This got a big "awwww" from the audience I watched it with. Only in Wes Anderson's movies do 12 year olds have more maturity and understanding than adults. What a world it would be if it were ours.
5 out of 5 stars
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