Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom -- Wes Anderson’s new film is slight and a little fey, but an audience pleaser. I saw the picture the Lagoon Theater in a packed house. The audience applauded over the film’s closing credits, something that almost never happens. Anderson’s is a classic auteur – all of his films bear his stamp, share a style, and display themes characteristic to him. Moonrise Kingdom, like other Anderson pictures, involves an upper middle class family, a bit shabby genteel, afflicted with a brilliant, highly precocious and domineering adolescent – in this case, the character is a teenage girl living in an unhappy household (Bill Murray and Francis McDormand play her defeated and estranged parents.) The family lives on a small island somewhere off the coast of Maine or Massachusetts. The island is part of an archipelago, occupied primarily by brown-shirted Khaki Scouts – obviously a surrogate for a large international scouting organization that undoubtedly would not consent to being parodied in this film. One of the scouts, a hyper-competent outdoorsman, has fled the encampment and eloped with the teenage girl. They hide in the wilds of the island as a hurricane of historic proportions approaches. Bruce Willis plays an Andy-Griffith-like local sheriff enlisted in the search for the missing children. The Khaki-scout hero is another character typical to Anderson films – the gifted nerd, someone who sees himself as the leading man in an epic adventure when he is obviously best suited to be cast as a supporting player or bit part. There is something a wee bit monotonous about Anderson’s obsessive exploration of the terrain of early adolescence – Anderson’s characters are sexually naïve, but romantic, highly articulate, and obsessed with the kinds of hobbies and fascinations that bright children have just before an interest in the opposite sex extinguishes those avocations. The romances in Anderson’s films are largely asexual, exploratory, idealistic, and sweet – although the subject matter is fraught with sentimentality, Anderson’s films are not usually cloying and this is their strength. Moonrise Kingdom does not disappoint in this respect. It’s a “family” picture in the best sense of the word and, I think the audience was applauding the fact that the film doesn’t ever devolve into mere cynicism. (It’s also pretty funny and involving in its own completely laid back way – the movie is the exact opposite of the special effects driven summer films screened in the other wings of the multiplex; Anderson doesn’t even bother to stage actions scenes – he sets them up and, then, cuts to the aftermath. He is totally uninterested in violence or, even, kinetic confrontation such as required by slapstick comedy or farce.) The picture’s tone exemplifies the highly sophisticated ethos of faux-naivety and insincere nostalgia familiar from Salinger’s novels and, more immediately obvious, Garrison Keillor’s books and Lake Woebegone stories – Salinger’s first person narrators are ancestral to Wes Anderson’s brilliant, hyper-articulate adolescents and Anderson’s films embody the same slightly idealized nostalgia for a past that Keillor’s audiences, by and large sophisticated big city folks, could not have tolerated for a week, let alone for years and decades. Don’t misunderstand me – Anderson, like Salinger and Keillor, is a highly deliberate artist – the precise tone of fake nostalgia, melancholy regret, and light comic sentiment is contrived with fanatical skill. There’s nothing inadvertent or accidental about the ways the film is put together – however, haphazard it might seem. Anderson does best with his young actors – Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, and, even, Harvey Keitel (to say nothing of Francis McDormand and Tilda Swinton) are wasted in roles underwritten to the point of vanishing. Indeed, Anderson’s world involves, as Kafka once noted: “hope, but not for the likes of us.” The film maker’s youthful prodigies have some kind of future before them; his adult characters are washed-up eccentrics and has-beens. None of the conflicts associated with any adult character are resolved by the plot – in fact, the notion of resolving such entrenched ennui and melancholia seems out of the question. Anderson’s typical filmic gesture is a tracking shot, moving right or left, through a series of small doll-house like sets, each exquisitely color coordinated and decorated box entrapping one of his characters in a tableaux-like vignette. The Darjeeling Express with its toy-train ambience and separate cars perfectly expresses this aesthetic; although, perhaps, Anderson’s weakest film, it was his most typical. Moonrise Kingdom is richer and its outdoor scenes open it up a bit. But there remains, I’m afraid, something just a trifle bit airless and confining about Anderson’s direction and his approach to this film.