Moonrise Kingdom is a movie about two troubled tween-agers, the pedantic, overly earnest Sam (Jared Gilmen), and the dreamy-eyed, unpredictably violent Suzy (Kara Hayward). The year is 1965, and the two of them live on a sleepy, mist-covered island somewhere off the coast of New England. Sam is unpopular and gets into trouble so often that his foster parents no longer want to harbor him. Suzy lives with her family, but she doesn’t much like them. She’s particularly put off after she finds one of her mother’s books. It’s called “How to Deal With a Troubled Child.” Sam and Suzy bond over their mutual unhappiness and decide to run away together.
That’s one way of describing this movie. Another way is to say that it’s a new movie directed by Wes Anderson. And boy, is it ever directed by Wes Anderson. The camera prefers to stay put and show us things from a head-on point of view, turning what in the hands of most directors would be a dynamic landscape into the inside of a diorama. Quirkiness abounds. Tilda Swinton, for example, plays a character simply known as Social Services, and one pivotal scene involves Sam and Suzy dancing to a French torch song on a beach.
You’d think that these two things would be at odds with each other, but they’re not. Somehow, Anderson manages to tell a genuinely involving story AND indulge all of his little directorial fancies at the same time. It helps that the story here really is worth telling. Sam and Suzy are memorable characters, and Anderson gets right up close and personal as they experience first love, first sex, first brush with real danger. I believed in them and their situation straight through to the end.
Meanwhile, the rest of the island is driving itself crazy trying to find the runaways. Suzy’s lawyer parents (Frances McDormand and Bill Murray) mean well but are perhaps having too many problems of their own to provide a great example for their daughter. Sam belongs to a Boy Scout-like organization, and his Scout Master (Edward Norton) also gets in on the search, as does local policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). The great thing about the script is that it doesn’t blame the incident on anyone in particular. The kids feel displaced and want to run away. The adults are all decent people who only want the best for them, but as much as they try they just can’t quite make a connection.
And now we come to the style, that Wes Andersonian way of doing things where the frames always look a little too pre-arranged and the people always speak a shade too precisely. The danger of such affectations is that they risk pulling the audience out of the story and forcing them to focus on how darn clever the whole operation is. Well, it ends up that when the whimsical visuals aren’t compensating for a story that’s not there, they actually add a lot of atmosphere. As disaffected youths, it makes sense that Sam and Suzy would view the world as a little bit askew.
Plus, with its fondness for dimension-squashing frames and faded pastel colors, Moonrise Kingdom is just plain fun to look at. The opening sequence shows off the rooms in Suzy’s home as though they’re on the inside of a dollhouse. Later, a couple of characters have a conversation in the foreground of a shot while legions of Boy Scouts storm-troop by in the background. You’ll notice lots of little details; a weird tracking shot here, a bit of costuming there, that turn the world of Moonrise Kingdom into a uniquely memorable place. Sprinkle that on top of the genuinely warm story and prop it up by several strong performances, especially by Bruce Willis and Edward Norton, and you’ve got the best movie Wes Anderson has made in years.
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