Wes Anderson is one of those directors whose films make you feel like you have to address his entire catalogue before you can write a review of his latest. Maybe that’s because they’re all so closely tied together in themes, aesthetics, and sensibilities that every time you write a review of another Wes Anderson film it feels like you’re just repeating yourself yet again, so the temptation is to instead just pit all of his projects against each other and rank them. I’m going to refrain from doing that though. Instead I’ll just say that Anderson’s sensibilities line up very much with my own, I find all of his films to be smart and funny, and his attention to detail as far as production design goes is always amazing to behold. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers, and I count even his works that are considered “lesser” amongst my favorite films.
This time around he’s telling the story of a couple of coming of age outsiders who have fallen in love. Sam (Jared Gilman) is an orphan, currently spending the summer as a Khaki Scout (they’re like the Boy Scouts, but khakier) on an undisclosed and remote island that seems to reside somewhere off the coast of New England. He’s a serious boy and a bold thinker, but something of a nerd, and he’s known his fair share of suffering. Suzy (Kara Hayward) is an artistic girl who lives on the other side of the island with her family. Her parents are good enough people, but their marriage isn’t in great shape and they’ve grown rather cold. As a result, Suzy is withdrawn and has rage issues. After a year of writing letters back and forth, Sam and Suzy decide to leave their respective residences and steal away into the woods together, for a period of at least ten days. The children are in love and on the run, the adults are lonely and in pursuit: things develop from there.
As is always the case with Anderson’s projects, Moonrise Kingdom has an ensemble cast of amazing actors, and everyone turns in a delightful performance. In addition to the leads being charming and magnetic, you also get a group of youthful unknowns playing the other members of Sam’s troop with appropriate quirk and a whole host of notable and reliable Hollywood names filling the available adult roles; even several that aren’t the usual Anderson collaborators. Suzy’s parents are played by Frances McDormand and Bill Murray, Sam’s scout leader by Ed Norton, and the island’s sheriff by Bruce Willis. One of the good things about actors like this is that the only review you have to give their performances is a listing of their names. Simply put: this cast rules.
But often Anderson’s characters are the things that become the subjects of derision, not his actors. The personalities that populate his films are criticized for being hollow and phony. They’re said to not be representations of real people, but just the sum of their crafted quirks and carefully curated outfits. That’s missing the point of what Anderson does though. His films always acknowledge that the characters are acting phony, that they’re all projecting a very self-aware image. They’re insecure people and they have myriad defense mechanisms... but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing real inside of them. On the contrary, Anderson characters aren’t hollow, they’re layered. Half of the fun of his films is digging around inside of them and trying to find out what’s real. The confusion comes because audiences can sometimes get thrown off due to the actual work you have to do. Anderson isn’t going to spell what’s real and what’s not out for you, and the conclusions you come to are likely to be debatable. That’s the whole point though. The worth of a jigsaw puzzle is in the process of solving it, not in admiring the finished product. Nobody would go to a puzzle museum.
Another one of Anderson’s trademarks is his offbeat humor, and Moonrise Kingdom has it in spades. Two of the most effective ways to cultivate gags are presenting the mundane with a mock-heroic flare and having well-established archetypes switch roles: and this filmmaker has mastered both. Most of the gags in this movie stem from the Khaki troops approaching the hunt for the protagonists with an inappropriately violent and mean-spirited attitude, or from the children being mature and capable beyond their years while their adult counterparts are too petty and impotent to be believed. It’s all standard Anderson stuff, but it never fails to tickle the funny bone.
His work is never presented as being broad, straight comedy, however, so this movie wouldn’t be a success if all it was able to do was amuse. There needs to be a connection to the characters, and their exploits need to have some weight and heft. Moonrise Kingdom was questionable for me for a while. It takes its time to build, it slowly unfolds in front of you; but once it picks up steam it becomes pretty effective stuff. By the time the montage that detailed Sam and Suzy’s letter writing history rolled around, I found that I had gone from being slightly skeptical to being absolutely in love. And by the time the serious storm that’s slowly approaching in the background of the entire film hits the island, the amount of menace that came with it was surprising. Most of that was due to the fact that the storm was arriving in tandem with the threat of Sam getting thrown into an orphanage by Social Services (Tilda Swinton), but the storm imagery really helped make the stakes more palpable. Sure, having thunder crack at the moment things are about to go down is an obvious way to add menace to your movie, but it’s obvious because it’s so tried and true. By the time the film climaxed I was completely engrossed in how everyone’s fates were going to turn out.
Maybe the most oft-discussed topic when it comes to Anderson’s works is his soundtracks. Generally everyone is in agreement that they’re impeccable—both in general song choice and in marriage of song with scene—but often fun gets poked at him for his over reliance on deep cuts from the British Invasion. Those that enjoy having some fun at the filmmaker’s expense will be sad to hear that Anderson has made another movie full of delightful music, but this time he steps out of his wheelhouse and doesn’t rely on obscure Rolling Stones and Zombies B-sides. I don’t want to give away all of Moonrise Kingdom’s sonic secrets, but I will say that it ends with a choral arrangement that I found to be absolutely sublime. Add to that the scene where the kids dance in their underwear on the beach to lewd French music, and we’ve all got another hipster home run on our hands.
