Wes Anderson, stuck in a creative marshland, needs a new muse because Moonrise Kingdom is just more of the same.
USA
3*
Director:
Wes Anderson
Screenwriters:
Wes Anderson
Roman Coppola
Director of Photography:
Robert Yeoman
Running time: 95 minutes
The worlds of Wes Anderson, the ones he created in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, among others, can be magical in a way few others are. His images are immediately recognisably his, and his characters are quirky and endearing despite them never being very complex.
In Moonrise Kingdom, arguably his least interesting film since his 1994 début, Bottle Rocket, he focuses his energy on a very small love story about a 12-year-old orphan boy and a 12-year-old girl with some anger management problems and presents it in his cute but formally conscious way.
In 1965, when Sam (Jared Gilman), a nerdy boy scout, escapes from his camp on New Penzance Island, somewhere off the New England coast, and Suzy (Kara Hayward) disappears from home on the other side of the island at the same time, many parties, including Suzy’s mother’s boyfriend, the simple-minded but good-hearted policeman played by Bruce Willis, try to track him down.
Small details about Sam’s childhood are uncovered along the way, and there is an adorable flashback to the first time Sam saw Suzy, a year earlier; we are also informed a hurricane will strike very soon and, in typical Wes Anderson style, the artifice of the fictional reality is taken one step further by having a play performed that employs flood imagery.
Moonrise Kingdom’s highlights are in the vein of that famous moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones comes up against a large and very intimidating sword-wielding fellow in a Cairo marketplace, whom he quickly and unexpectedly dispatches with a mere gunshot. Anderson surprises us in ways we couldn’t have imagined.
As a result, the film is consistently charming, even though there is very little plot to hold on to. Anderson has always liked to play around with form and here too, he uses the narrator character played by Bob Balaban to inform us point-blank, in shots that are mostly empty save his headway at the bottom of the frame, about upcoming events or to fill in the background at some points.
But while the director’s playful approach to the construction of his images – including the great number of smooth lateral or vertical tracking shots that almost exclusively comprise the opening sequence – has evinced enormous creativity in the past, his film this time around is oddly stripped of emotion. Think back to the emotion conjured up in the scene by the sighting of the jaguar shark in Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Moonrise Kingdom mimics the previous films’ form but not their concomitant emotive force.
The film is more of a cardboard spectacle than any of his previous films, and Anderson seems to be treading the water of his imagination. This fact can also be surmised from the intertextual references he makes, always well integrated in his previous films but here not quite on the same level. A nifty but completely out-of-place reference to Citizen Kane occurs in the opening sequence when the camera literally passes through a table, and it’s easy to guess where Anderson got the idea of having Sam’s escape route from his tent masked by a poster.
Such references are quaint but become burdensome when we realise McDormand’s character is not all that different from the wonderful performance she gave in Almost Famous. Not to mention the Looney Tunes moment when Sam gets hit by lightning.
The director appears to have fallen into a creative rut. He would need to cut down on the big names and find his next muse because when Jason Schwartzman briefly appears in this film, he only makes us long for the good old days of Rushmore.
For those who have never seen a Wes Anderson movie, Moonrise Kingdom will be a wonderful entry into his world. For those who are familiar with his work, the film provides more of the same – a safe retreat to gorgeously framed images and perennially eccentric characters, but nothing more than that.