Moonrise Kingdom Review

Wes Anderson is one of the few filmmakers working today who is an auteur in the truest sense of the word.  Practically any frame from one of his movies drips with his colorful, inimitable style.  With their laboriously detailed compositions, heightened dialogue, and stiff-but-emotive acting, Anderson's films inhabit a very specific niche, and a polarizing one at that.  While Moonrise Kingdom is unlikely to win over non-fans of Anderson's work, it does represent the director at his most focused, at his most quintessentially Anderson.  There's a clarity and precision in Moonrise Kingdom that go above and beyond anything Anderson has achieved before, and the result is, perhaps ironically,  his most accessible film to date.

True to form, Moonrise Kingdom is gorgeous to look at.  Each shot feels like a page out of a pop-up book or a carefully constructed diorama.  Even the outdoor locations are so finely captured as to feel almost artificial, cut from the same cloth that made Fantastic Mr. Fox such a delight to look at, albeit without the perhaps more malleable animated medium to employ this time.  Anderson's camera achieves an impressive balancing act, using static shots to frame the heightened period fairy tale feel of the film, and rambling tracking shots to capture the urgency of the central rescue mission.

Though the rescue mission is really secondary to the real heart of the film: the budding romance between Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), two runaways who escape into the wilderness so as to explore their growing love.  Like the Noah's Ark drama that figures into Sam and Suzy's first meeting (and is echoed in the looming threat of a violent storm brewing offshore), the kids are two of a kind: both are out of place in their families, considered emotionally disturbed, adventurers at heart, old souls in young bodies.  Anderson isn't one to concern himself with plot; instead, he delves into character and crafts wonderful, witty dialogue steeped in fanciful rhythms and replete with hilarious non sequiturs.

Gilman and Hayward, both newcomers, are pint-sized revelations, handling Anderson's heightened dialogue with the casual wooden quality and subtle emotion that the director always elicits from his cast.  Gilman brings Sam an easy confidence but allows the audience to see the innocence Sam himself doesn't notice, while Hayward imbues Suzy with a dangerous streak, a beautiful enigma.  Together, their chemistry pops in a very Andersonian fashion, perhaps best captured in the sequence of exchanging letters, during which the characters reveal their underlying emotional and social problems in overlapping narration, or in the wonderfully awkward dance party on the beach.

The star-studded supporting cast includes Anderson regulars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman, both of whom are so comfortable and familiar in this kind of film that they feel almost as ingrained in the stylistic whole as the bold colors (warm nostalgic yellows, subtly romantic reds, dangerous blues) and impeccably chosen music, both of which contribute substantially to the film's (restrained) emotional resonance.  Edward Norton is sweetly inept as the gee-whiz camp counselor who can't manage to keep his troop in line, and Bruce Willis and Tilda Swinton both deliver in their roles as the lonely police officer leading the search and Social Services, a woman so defined by her career that it has become her name, respectively.

Then there's the group of young boys who make up the remainder of the Khaki Scouts, who work together as a unit to garner some of the film's biggest laughs.  Considered along with the leads, it's impressive what a talented young cast Anderson has gathered here.

At a neat ninety minutes, Moonrise Kingdom breezes by, without a wasted moment.  Anderson has trimmed the fat; unlike many of his other films, there's not a scene that drags or a shot that feels unnecessary.  Anderson has perfected his voice, achieving the sort of laser focus that is fitting for a director so known for the careful construction of his films.  Moonrise Kingdom represents the most unified and successful concoction yet: a lovely, charming childhood romance wrapped in the trappings of a period fairy tale, with all the underlying darkness and gradual loss of innocence that ought to imply.