It’s a love story. Two misfit souls, drawn together through unlikely circumstances, decide to withdraw from their untenable, dissatisfying lives at home and run off together. They can hide away from prying eyes in the loveliness of nature and enjoy their bond with a candor and intimacy they couldn’t back home. It’s a classic set-up, as old as romance itself, the desire for a couple to get away from it all and spend time with each other. In this case, that desire to be left alone is complicated by the fact that they’re 12 year olds.
Moonrise Kingdom is complicated by a lot more than that, actually, as if that weren’t enough. The young couple is Sam (Jared Gilman), a shrewd but awkward outcast among his fellow “Khaki Scouts,” and Suzy (Kara Hayward), a Wednesday Addams-type with a penchant for kittens and violent outbursts. In another era, these precocious pre-teens would be diagnosed with some disorder and promptly medicated, but Moonrise Kingdom takes places in 1965 on the remote island community of New Penzance, off the New England coast, and such children are instead looked upon with bewilderment and more than a little worry. Suzy’s parents, Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand), certainly don’t know what to do with her; they’re having a hard enough time keeping their fraying marriage together even before Suzy runs off. Sam, an orphan, is casually disowned by his foster family when word spreads that he’s disappeared from Scout Camp. Left to do most of the legwork are Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), Sam’s earnest troop leader at camp, and the island’s lone police officer, the lonely Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). Once they figure out the children’s disappearances are related, they set off to intercept the fleeing lovebirds wherever in the island’s dense wilderness they might have gone. It so happens that Sam and Suzy have disappeared on the eve of what will eventually be documented as one of the worst thunder storms to ever hit the tiny island community.
See? Complicated.
In another time, the disappearance of two children in a remote wilderness would trigger Amber Alerts, satellite image searches, helicopters, 24-7 news reporting, and a string of lawsuits so long one could make a separate, really boring movie about them. But this isn’t our time, and it’s arguably not even our world. Writer-director Wes Anderson, co-scripting with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola, has never really specialized in realism. Anderson instead has, through all his films like Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited, crafted a meticulously composed version of reality, a thoughtfully realized candy-colored fantasia that has never quite resembled what the world really looks like, or even how normal people might act. Consequently, the world presented by Anderson’s movies can often feel antiseptic, or at the very least surreally anachronistic.
Moonrise Kingdom circumvents that feeling by not only placing the story in the past, one where the director’s devotion to Kodachrome designs and compositions can feel appropriately idealized, but also by making his story about children who want to act like grown-ups and grown-ups who continue to act like children. Newcomers Hayward and Gilman, as Suzy and Sam, handle Anderson’s highly stylized script with ease, coming off as relatively worldly but without that strange self-awareness that often infests child actors. In one scene, Sam and Suzy, in their skivvies in a secluded lagoon, awkwardly embrace and engage in some spin-the-bottle-level awkward fumbling. It’s a little uncomfortable to watch, these kids going through the motions of what they think adult intimacy looks like (compounded by how much younger than Suzy Sam looks), but the two embrace in a way that’s non-judgmental of each other and even, in its monumental discomfort, sort of sweet and funny. Gilman and Hayward carry the movie while surrounded by bluntly neurotic parent figures played by A-list actors, a feat they manage through repeatedly hitting that sweet spot between sincere and awkward.
The saga of Suzy and Sam forms the sympathetic heart of the movie, and the rest is much of the usual Anderson quirk. His signature style is in full effect, from the idiosyncratic dialogue to the strange moments of violence and slapstick that wouldn’t be out of place in a Looney Tunes cartoon. While Anderson’s distinctive sensibilities could occasionally feel labored in his other films, making the wrapping more impressive than the present, Moonrise Kingdom gets it right. Hayward and Gilman, along with a game supporting cast, break through any barriers of cynicism that pop up due to packs of murderous Scouts and the occasional small child struck by lightning. It’s not the real world, not 1965 and certainly not our present, but by the time Moonrise Kingdom rolls to its tidy conclusion, you’ll be glad that at least in some version of the world, a couple of crazy kids found something approximating love. In the real world this would be shortly obliterated by distance and puberty, but in the movie’s world it’s always late summer. Cold realities are for a winter that never comes on New Penzance, full of complicated people looking for simple ways out.
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Film: Moonrise Kingdom
Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton
Directed By: Wes Anderson
Written By: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
Produced By: Jeremy Dawson, Scott Rudin, Wes Anderson, and Steven M. Rales
Distributor: Focus Features
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 94 minutes
Website: http://www.moonrisekingdom.com/#home
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Release Date: June 15, 2012
