REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom

Directed By: Wes Anderson

“A live action cartoon” might seem like a damaging put-down of a film conceived as an auteur driven independent project with pretensions of sophistication and a booking as the opening film of the year’s Cannes Film Festival but it is a genuine compliment intended to highlight the high degree of formal control displayed by director Wes Anderson in his sixth feature film.

Dressed to nines and production designed to the gills, the film offers up copious film-maker eccentrics and more reason to celebrate Wes Anderson’s directing talents rather than his more widely praised writing and dressing ones. 

The story here is only a hook for another of Mr. Anderson’s impressive visual displays as he lets loose his signature taste with the very grass growing in the back of an already busy frame. Essentially a love story between two pre-pubescent “difficult” teenagers who elope together sparking a wild goose chase over their quaint island, the film is tailored to be an extremely handsome fair tail style spectacle.

Bravura tracking shots open the film and are littered throughout. The side tracking shots, capturing the characters in the foreground as amusing mis-en-scene enlivens the in focus background, the film reminds of the similar technique used in his previous film, a stop-motion animated film, inspiring the comparison made in the first line of this review.

The actors have pride of place besides the carefully designed furniture and costumes; they are equally well arranged and directed in the frame. They each have a constantly amused or amusing persona and deliver the quiet quip-y lines with just the required amount of poker-faced-ness. It doesn’t get drier than Mr. Norton and Mr. Willis as ineffectual men in command.

The lead stars though, the aforementioned teen lovers are camera friendly and easily rooted for. The boy with the fuzz just beginning to grow on his upper lip has a brave pup-dog look which goes well with his character while Kara Hayward looking considerably older than her lover, blooms as a 60’s beauty just about to discover her sure to be enormous and appealing sexuality. There is goofiness to the romance precisely because of the imperfect balance between the physical attractiveness of the lead pair which is nevertheless played very dry and poker-faced just like the rest of the movie.

The film whooshes by at an easy 90 minutes (including the credits) and remains a warm delight in memory. One remembers the many memorable images and even the deeply invested finale where the film almost musters up an intense poignancy as the fate of our lovers seems less than rosy than the rest of the film indicated. The storm and flood sequence at the end of the movie has to be considered a set-piece, almost an epic conclusion to a film of such modest ambitions. Production values, including Mr. Desplat’s rambunctious score, are superb across the board.

As rigorously composed Mr. Anderson’s frames are, they almost seem like Zack Snyder like slavish recreations of existing graphic art material. That is clearly not the case though seem to indicate that the story boards for Mr. Anderson’s film would surely make great graphic novels. One is left to wonder that if Mr. Anderson were to adapt a graphic novel, the results wouldn’t be just as appealing.

4/5