Critics reviews

Moonrise Kingdom (2012) is an adventure movie in the true sense. It breathes an air of freedom and curiosity and what can only be called elation as it charts the flight of a pair of young runaways just emerging from childhood. They prove fitting heroes, figures not so much of bewildered innocence as of awakening brilliance and ferocious clarity of intention.

That's what Moonrise Kingdom abundantly offers: nesting love stories that chafe against one another, sparking inadvertent resentment, disillusionment, and, occasionally, the sort of unions and reunions that allow one to believe that anything's possible.

Moonrise Kingdom illuminates its director's conflicted attraction toward... the classical "comedy of love" that, according to scholar G. Beiner, encompasses "courtship, marriage, friendship, family reunion, and . . . a return to a reconstituted civilized order"... Such comedy inevitably relies on a "temporary but extreme departure from everyday constraints," but as with the return of the runaways in Moonrise Kingdom, it binds its escapees back into twisted knots of communal ties.

Moonrise Kingdom is a film that takes many aspects of Anderson's cinema that had been latent or even (to me) twee window-dressing and brings them front and center, not only formally but thematically and emotionally.

Moonrise Kingdom is nostalgic without being precious, forward-looking without being presumptuous; it's as much about the fantasies of the director's own childhood as it is about his uncertainty of what happens after that first rush of true love, and how the perils of adulthood can change such an emotion.

Moonrise Kingdom climaxes with a messy, prolonged setpiece of physical disaster, as a hurricane leads to flash flooding. Following the cider flood displacing the animals in Fantastic Mr. Fox and forcing them to relocate to the sewers, this is the second literal and symbolic Anderson storm. Messy, excessive and a little endless, it's a strong attempt to push the movie outside of the Wes Anderson box through an action sequence.

I remain unenchanted by Wes Anderson. When his admirers point to the soulfulness trembling behind his deadpan compositions, I mostly see a maniacally fastidious eye at the service of a self-consciously fey sensibility. Still, when the two 12-year-old runaways stood over a speared white pooch ("Was he a good dog?" "Who can say? But he didn't deserve to die"), I felt the oddball intensity and was reminded of why it just won't do to simply dismiss him as "cute" or "twee" anymore.

Anderson, for his part, relies on art to give what was dying its old life back. Not content to memorialize, he resurrects. He takes up his camera as a benevolent magician might take up a wand to make a vanished dove re-appear, and in one elegant fade, Moonrise Kingdom exists once more.

A flashback to Sam and Suzy's epistolary courtship, featuring snippets of each hand-printed letter (almost invariably cut off mid-sentence), establishes their ardor with giddy economy, freeing the two young actors playing them to inhabit that weirdly amorphous zone between friendship and desire in which preadolescent romance inevitably gets stuck. That there's such a melancholic undercurrent only makes the film that much tangier and richer.

His trademark whimsy is still there (the non sequiturs, the natty production design, the carefully curated soundtrack, and so on). But, crucially, this time around those elements actually tell us something about the characters and their environs, rather than just serving as evidence of Anderson's exquisite taste. The bric-a-brac feels charming, not heavy-handed.

When, oh when, would Anderson combine his aesthetic obsessions (the francophilia, the Americana, the prep-schoolery), with his natural wit and the heart you assume he had? I love the meticulous diorama framing and the hoisting, pivoting, dumbwaitered, nearly hydraulic camerawork. I would even tolerate the dollhouse framing. I just didn't want the dolls. I wanted Anderson to show me a soul. "Moonrise Kingdom" does that.

The unruly spirit of Fantastic Mr. Fox is replaced here with a mannerism rendered all the more obvious by the lack of a convincing narrative. In this innocuous Badlands for minors, where benevolence wins over rage and disenchantment, we watch children dressed like adults taking orders from adults dressed like children. And in doing so one may realize that it is perhaps this incapacity to put an end to eternal adolescence that brought us this bedtime story in the middle of a waking nightmare.