Impossible Worlds: A Review and Analysis of Moonrise Kingdom

Man, Wes Anderson has made enemies.  In the days leading up to Moonrise Kingdom, I was surprised at the number of serious cinephiles who stepped forward to denounce the man as a fraud or an overrated hack, the chief quirk-monger in an era of quirk-mongers.  The criticisms generally go as follows: that he's a smug and hollow stylist, pretentiously piling on eccentricities but capturing no human feeling; that he indulgently gets lost in his own little world; and that he's spent the last 10 years making the same movie over and over again with diminishing returns.

To answer the last charge first, it's true that Anderson has repeated the same themes, style, and casting decisions.  But the same could be also be said of much more venerated directors (Ozu in the 50s, say), who are just as guilty of repetition and don't catch as much guff for it, nor should they.  In retrospect, and divorced from post-Tenenbaums hype and comparison, even The Darjeeling Limited is looking better with age, a welcome stop on a director's quiet evolution.

As for the first charge, that Anderson's work has no human emotion, just hipster irony, I have very little sympathy.  Anderson's style of whimsy has certainly set the trend for indie (and "indie") films of the last decade, and the years since Rushmore have turned "quirky" into a catchword so overused that I hesitate to even type it.  But Anderson maintains a keen grasp of emotional subtlety and rich detail that none of his imitators have been able to equal.  Even in Anderson's weaker films, there is always this undercurrent: a pathos, an aching desire to belong and a disappointment in the way life pans out.  He eschews politics, realism, and film's more radical potential, but his sympathy for his characters—and his optimistic view of groups that get torn apart, then heal—is as effective and emotionally sincere as anything in cinema today.

And as for getting lost in his little own world, hang onto that, because getting lost in your own little world is a big part of what Moonrise Kingdom is about.

The story takes place on the island community of New Penzance, located off the coast of New England (or, more specifically, inside Wes Anderson's head).  On a late summer day, two twelve-year-olds run away together.  Suzy is a troubled pre-adolescent, feeling isolated in her large family, keeping to herself, and acting out by stealing fantasy books from the library.  Sam is an orphan and an outcast, bounced through different foster families and ostracized by his scout troop, the only community he's a part of.  Hand in hand, Sam and Suzy dart off into the wilderness, with a ragtag group of parents, scouts, and a lone police officer in pursuit.  The year, we are told, is 1965—a year for mod fashion, youth rebellion, and the Generation Gap.  It's also the year of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou, which Moonrise echoes with its lovers-on-the-run narrative and wilderness idyll (in fact, both films also feature an abstract scissor attack, and I'm guessing this isn't coincidence).

With its heroes on the cusp of adolescence, the film becomes a strange twist on Peter Pan, as they seek to escape their childhoods rather than preserve them.  The touching thing about the romance between Suzy and Sam is that the two of them, being beginners, clearly don't know much about love at all, and in fact start by constantly saying the wrong things.  (Key line: "I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about").  But what they've found in each other is someone they can be completely honest to—a rarity when you're twelve—and it grows from there.  In time, they arrive at a secluded cove and turn it into their own experimental paradise of adult freedom; a response, you might say, to the way freedom is failing the actual adults they know.  Meanwhile, a hurricane of historic proportions is bearing down on the island, threatening to wipe everything away—but perhaps replace it with something better.  As a coming of age story, it's beautiful: very symbolic, gently surreal, and more successfully tender than Anderson has been in a long time.  It's encouraging that Anderson has scored an art-house sleeper hit with what may be his oddest film yet.

In large part, the film plays as a compendium of Anderson's favorite things: the conflation of childhood and adulthood, deadpan humor, lateral tracking shots, "Peanuts" references, New Wave homages, and everything art-directed to within an inch of its life.  But make no mistake, Anderson is not remaking the same film, and Moonrise Kingdom represents a departure for him in subtle ways, from an elliptical narrative rhythm (with much more silence) to a climactic violation of the laws of physics that has little precedent in his previous films.  For music, anyone expecting montages set to recognizable favorites like the Kinks and David Bowie will have to make do with Benjamin Britten and Francoise Hardy.  But most of all, Moonrise Kingdom is the most aestheticized film he's made yet: the world of New Penzance, in its precise geometry, makes the The Royal Tenenbaums look like on-the-street guerrilla filmmaking.  In a way, this is the most "Wes Anderson" movie that he's made yet, the farthest he's pursued his obsessions.  But it works.  I had thought that he'd have to come back up to the surface; turns out, he broke the rut by going deeper down the rabbit hole.

But don't mistake this for hollow stylization, because—and this is key—the aesthetics of the film are very much integral to its theme.  Anderson gives up the game even before the main title card.  The opening sequence begins on a painting of Suzy's house.  We then pan from room to room in the real house itself, culminating in a reverse zoom out the window, settling on a shot of the house that in "reality" (or rather, the film's version of it) is framed exactly like the painting: the same profile, the same proportions, and equally two-dimensional.  We see, before the plot has even kicked in, an acknowledgement that Moonrise Kingdom takes place in a world where art and reality dovetail together, where the rules of the latter are overwhelmed by the whims of the former.

The film plays with this duality in small and large ways: the exaggerated sets (looking like dollhouses or expensive dioramas), the Gilbert-and-Sullivan reference in the island's name, Suzy's escape into fantasy books, and the presence of Bob Balaban as the local "metereologist", who mostly acts as a detached all-knowing narrator—only, at one narrative impasse, he also pokes his head into the story to help move it all to the next step.

This theme of art, and its pivotal, self-conscious role in the film's universe, comes full circle.  In the end, Sam and Suzy's cove—their adolescent Utopia, which they've named "Moonrise Kingdom"—is gone, wiped off the map by the hurricane.  But while they can never go back, Sam has recreated it in a painting.  We end on a close-up of this painting, which gently fades into a shot of the real thing.  The world as they saw and experienced it can be neither sustained nor recovered.  It can, however, take on a second life in art.  The film—hell, Anderson's whole career—is its own "Moonrise Kingdom", a series of fantasies realized by the resources of a film production.  Anderson once said that when he was younger, he liked to draw communities of people living in giant trees, riding motorcycles along the branches, taking an elevator up the trunk, or lifting off from a helipad in the canopy.  It's a loopy childhood daydream, but not too far removed from the world that the adult Anderson created for this film.

This is a story about escape, and it understands both the glory and the impossibility of that goal.  Film, of course, has always been big part.  It's the closest we've come yet.