Moonrise Kingdom (***3/4)

The best clue to whether you’ll like a Wes Anderson movie is whether you’ve liked other Wes Anderson movies. That’s not necessarily true of most other directors, or even most writer-directors, but even when translated to animation, as in 2009’s fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox, the hallmarks of Anderson’s style remain intact. In the opening minutes of his young-love tale, we see them—the curious use of the zoom lens, and split screens, and especially the bright colors. The random elements, like Bob Balaban as the on-screen narrator discussing this history of the small (fictional) island of New Penzance, where most the story takes place. He even, lately, uses his own titling font, a la Woody Allen. In the main, I have found that these hallmarks both maintain interest and place the viewer at a remove. Watching Anderson’s work, which includes The Darjeeling Limited and The Royal Tenenbaums, one doesn’t so much suspend one’s disbelief as ignore it and marvel at the inventiveness so prominently on display.

But even though I’ve just said that, it is possible that someone who didn’t like other Anderson movies might like this one, because of all his movies, the ones where genuine emotion does creep in the most are his two about young love, Rushmore (about a teen boy’s crush on a teacher), and this one, about a a boy and a girl who are not even teens, yet decide to run away together. They are smart kids, articulate even, and they are about as unusual as Anderson’s adult characters, but there was still some kind of realness about them. Both played by first-time actors, they are particular characters. We see this in the boy’s digressions about scouting, and in the way the girl brings along her record player and her favorite books, not common ones another filmmaker might use to evoke the time period, the mid-1960s in this case, but ones that she would have felt were hers alone. Most likely you will not precisely identify with these children, but will perhaps remember the way you too had a now-faded obsession or favorite object at a similar age. You will remember when you wanted to be older and allowed to do what you wanted.

In other words, while much of the plotting, which involves a scout leader (Edward Norton), an officer (Bruce Willis), and the girl’s parents (Frances McDormand, Bill Murray) tracking down the missing couple, has the slightly artificial quality I associate with Anderson, I forgot that in the scenes with the two young leads, and to some extent in the scenes with the officer and the boy, who is an orphan. They speak to the sense of being alone felt by many children. Even the way the children are played by actors who look the actual ages, she being taller than him, helps set these segments in a reality. They place the audience in that time of life where one has begun to understand the world enough to see its possibilities and want to grasp them.

IMDb link

viewed 7/5/12 7:45 at Ritz East and reviewed 7/5/12, 7/12/12