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  • Moonrise Kingdom

    Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
    Bill Murray, Francis McDormand, Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward. Directed by Wes Anderson.

    Sam is a young teenager, a member of a Boy Scouts kind of organization who runs away from his troop with Suzy, another young teenager. Sam is a smart, thoughtful, socially awkward, artistic loner. Suzy is a smart, articulate, lonely trouble-maker in school. Sam runs from his troop; Suzy runs from her family. Together they set up camp in a small harbor with a suitcase full of Suzy’s books and Sam’s considerable camping skills.

    Here’s the thing about Wes Anderson, the director and co-writer of Moonrise Kingdom. When I saw Bottle Rocket many years ago, I was thrilled by the charismatic lead actors and the characters they portrayed. There was a quirkiness about the plot, dialogue, and characters that I really admired, and although the narrative fell a bit short of satisfying, the newness of these film-makers’ voices (Anderson co-wrote the script with his college friend Owen Wilson) was enough to keep me interested. Martin Scorsese famously listed Bottle Rocket as one of his ten favorite movies of the 1990s, and you could see why.

    When Rushmore was released a couple of years later, again written by Anderson and Wilson, the critics swooned, and my interest was further tickled by the same stuff. But where the critics seemed to love the story, I found it completely unsatisfying, as if the writers and director had set me up for something really good (with excellent pieces in place) that was never delivered. I don’t have a problem with movies that don’t seem to go anywhere, plot-wise, but the feeling I had at the end of the film was one of a director telling me he had just said something meaningful, when in fact the plot had set up the meaningful something without ever getting there. As an ardent admirer of Bill Murray, I wanted to like this film much more than I did; there wasn’t enough movie where there should have been more movie.

    If the critics swooned over Rushmore, they went ga-ga over The Royal Tenenbaums, which was even less satisfying than Rushmore. That film seemed like little more than a self-indulgence. Not only were the quirky characters not nearly as interesting as the characters in the two previous films, but they were so self-aware in their quirkiness that the entire thing felt like a put-on, as if Anderson were flexing his new Hollywood cred by populating his movie with big-name actors playing unimaginably idiosyncratic characters and then leading them all through a plot that ended in a empty lot at the end of a boring cul-de-sac.

    I felt like I’d been taken. So The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou came and went and with nary a notice by me, and though I liked the trailer for The Darjeeling Limited, I refused to be hoodwinked again and ignored all critics’ reviews. I did see The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I also found unsatisfying, but I didn’t know whether to blame that on Anderson or on Roald Dahl, so I don’t really count that one.

    I probably would have avoided Moonrise Kingdom, too, if I hadn’t been so intrigued by the trailer, and if two friends hadn’t invited me to see it with them one Saturday night.

    I have to say that it looked, sounded, and felt great from the very beginning. But my overwhelming thought through the first half of the film was, “Here we go again.” I was sure I was being set up once again for a narrative disappointment. That disappointment never came, so I saw it again the following week with fresh eyes.

    It is visually an amazing movie, looking like a combination pop-up children’s book and those shoebox dioramas that once passed for book reports when I was in elementary school. Characters are not only quirky, but pathetic and interesting, many of the adults carrying a kind of tragic gravitas that seems well-earned, a sad, how-did-I-get-here grownup persona that the film’s main characters are determined to avoid becoming.

    Among the film’s many accomplishments, the most admirable is the way Anderson walks the line between treating his main characters too much like little children and treating them too much like young adults. Sam and Suzy are tweeners, old enough to declare love for one another but not exactly old enough to do too much with those declarations. At this in-between age, boys are still short and chubby-cheeked, while girls are reaching already into maturity, a disparity that the film acknowledges but doesn’t exploit beyond a very realistic awareness of the tenuous foothold these young characters have on their own developing sexuality.

    Suzy is presented as pretty, the kind of young teenager whose future beauty grownups are aware of even if her peers don’t see it yet. Anderson could play it safe and present her in the antiseptic, unsexualized, pre-pubescent way we want to see our young teens, but to do so would be to ignore or forget the reality. He could have gone too far the other way, the way so many Hollywood pictures do, presenting his thirteen-year-old character as much older, wiser, and knowledgeable, but that would be just as negligent. There is another in-between approach, a kind of Lolita-like presentation where the character is supposed to be ignorant while the viewer is not, but that’s not this film’s intention.

    In a very non-provocative way, Anderson reminds us of this character’s sexuality without making lechers of the grownup characters or of the viewers. When the characters dance on the beach in their underwear, it’s pretty innocent, but it’s not totally innocent. Innocent with potential is what it is, like those early, tentative forays into romance that we experienced ourselves at that age.

    It’s a bold approach, and Anderson takes it confidently, sensitively, and deftly. When I said, “He really walks a tricky line” to the English majors I saw the film with the first night, I didn’t even have to explain. They were nodding their heads before I was finished saying it.

    None of this is to say this is not a flawed movie. There are parts of the plot that get a bit bogged down, and I could have used just a bit more information about the grownup characters, but that’s only because they are so interesting and well-acted. The only technical misstep is a soundtrack that’s just too invasive. Anderson uses the film’s music thoughtfully and deliberately, but I think it’s an unnecessary approach most of the time, one that takes away from the film’s overall quality.

    Still, I was most pleasantly surprised by Moonrise Kingdom, one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.
    But I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I GOT IT ALL! (George Costanza)
    GrouchyTeacher.com

  • #2
    Re: Moonrise Kingdom

    With more copies available, it looks like I will be viewing this first - I'm looking forward to it!
    May I always be found beneath your contempt.

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Moonrise Kingdom

      I enjoyed the movie, but it is flawed, perhaps fatally. The heavy-handed direction, including 'artsy' camera shots, distracts from a fun and quirky storyline. There is no suspension-of-disbelief here, it's just a drawn-out SNL skit with deadpan acting and an upgrade in props. It reaches for a lot more, but ends up as neither here nor there.
      May I always be found beneath your contempt.

      Comment

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