Wes Anderson’s directing career can be summed up in a single word: whimsy. The eleven features he’s made since 1996 are unique partly because of their skewed vision of the world we all know. His fans enjoy the idiosyncratic performances he gets from his informal stock company of actors, which includes such big-name talents as Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Anjelica Huston, the always amusing Bob Balaban, and of course Bill Murray. Then there’s his distinctive approach to set design: his visuals tend to make everything look just a wee bit artificial, as though the characters are living and working in a giant dollhouse.
Anderson’s work is not to everyone’s taste, and I admit that his droll , deadpan approach sometimes strikes me as too much of a good thing. Asteroid City, for example, is so busy being spoofy about the threat of extraterrestrials and the production of a theatre extravaganza that I gave up on trying to find a thread between the film’s various component parts. Anderson is at his best when he can find the heart of the matter: the human emotions connecting the artistically clever touches.
That’s what I like about 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Yes, this island-set film has many of the familiar Anderson touches, like a cast of legendary faces, an oddball use of music (here Benjamin Britten’s “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” is featured, played on a kid-sized portable record player), and a mischievous use of maps, letters, and other documents to tell the tale. There’s satire aplenty in Anderson’s look at a troop of Boy Scouts (led by Edward Norton and here called Khaki Scouts) who are working hard on their eccentric wilderness skills. Characters have funny jobs, or do their jobs in a funny—though sometimes grotesque—way. (Bruce Willis is a local police chief embroiled in a secret affair with one of the island residents; Tilda Swinton plays a straight-laced social services officer who seems to be keen on electroshock therapy.)
But the chief focus of Moonrise Kingdom is on two young people unwilling to learn the ways of their elders. Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop, are both about 12 and on the brink of puberty. Neither is at all comfortable with the adult world that seems to have no place for them, and a chance meeting leads to a clandestine correspondence, and then a daring attempt to break away from civilization and live on their own, as a sort of pint-sized Adam and Eve. (Suzy is rather taller than the clever but nerdy Sam, one of the film’s endearing details.)
Pretty soon everyone on the island is engaged in the effort to find the missing pair, and then figure out what to do with them. The ending is about as quirky and happy as a Wes Anderson project can be, leaving the viewer content that life—in all its craziness—will go on. I love the fact that Anderson’s sometimes over-the-top visual ideas vie for attention here with the island’s natural beauty. (The scout troop’s treehouse is an eccentric marvel.) I also love the sense that the story at times mirrors some of the grand old tales we all know. Sam is, picturesquely, an orphan wanted by no one. And the scene of Suzy in the woods, reading from one of her enchanting storybooks to a rapt circle of Khaki Scouts, seems straight out of Peter Pan. This is Anderson’s stab at a coming-of-age film. As the young characters find love, it’s easy for the viewer to fall in love with them.
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