Directed by:
Wes AndersonCinematography:
Robert D. YeomanComposer:
Alexandre DesplatCast:
Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Harvey Keitel, Bob Balaban (more)VOD (4)
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An island off the New England coast, summer of 1965. Two twelve-year-olds, Sam and Suzy, fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As local authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing offshore... Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom stars Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward as the young couple on the run, Bruce Willis as Island Police Captain Sharp, Edward Norton as Khaki Scout troop leader Scout Master Ward, and Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy’s attorney parents, Walt and Laura Bishop. The cast also includes Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Bob Balaban. The magical soundtrack features the music of Benjamin Britten. (Criterion)
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Reviews (12)
Like a heretic, I confess that I have only seen Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, which didn't quite fit my mood at the time and has been waiting for a second chance ever since. After Moonrise Kingdom, I will definitely give it that chance. And I'm definitely going to (finally) watch Anderson's older films too, because this one literally charmed me - with everything. An original, funny, endearingly childish adult spectacle, perfectly cast, even better written and directed, and with a great Desplat score. What more can I ask for?
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Wes Anderson lives in a strange world full of strange and crazy people. It seems a bit as if his films had eaten a ton of mushrooms before the screening, and I watched the rain alternating with cloudy weather. And that’s when the moon comes out. Anyway, I have to say plainly that I expected a little more, mainly because of the great cast who appear in the film. That included both my favorite Bruce Willis and, on the contrary, Edward Norton, with whom I never know what to think, as well as the director’s staples like Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman, who are always joy to watch. I didn’t have a problem with the actors; what was worse was the storytelling and the scouts, who seemed to have crawled out of the factory for the absolute. It was nice, but it was weird and that’s why the three stars are just right.
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I was pretty lukewarm on Wes Anderson's Rushmore, but I'll gladly stand behind Moonrise Kingdom for what would be a quality film from a very oddball director. The whole thing felt so terribly childlike and playful at times that it even reminded me a bit of Michel Gondry's work (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep). A perfect cast of actors portraying a panopticon of bizarre yet incredibly likeable characters. Besides that, what struck me about the film was the rather unusual cinematography, more precisely its movements, and the great attention to various details about the characters, which were constantly repeated and seemed funny (left-handed scissors, Sunday school shoes, "Social Service"). In short, a film that is probably not for everyone, but those who agree to Anderson's rules and submit to his "poetics" will be extremely satisfied.
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I have to say that this time the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson works everything (everything that the eye can see) to the tiniest detail, which is nice and I appreciate it, but the charm of the story gets drowned under all that heavy and refined splendour. Visually, it’s beautiful – it was a lot of fun to pour over each scene and notice how Anderson moves with the camera (the opening credits!) – but I never got into the story and it didn’t affect me at all on an emotional level. All of Anderson’s films are standoffish, but you can find in them places to feel sad or moved… but here I missed them. The same applies to his characters, they are all (very) weird, but this time I missed the vitality I felt in Mr. Fox, Zissou and others. In Moonrise Kingdom I only found that vitality in Bill Murray’s character (the night scene in the bed), who was given very little space. Immediately after watching it, an unenthusiastic 80%, but it needs to lager a couple of days.
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At the idea level, Moonrise Kingdom is basically a live-action version of Fantastic Mr. Fox, but with greater interest in the juvenile protagonist, who in Anderson’s film is equal to the adult protagonists (which is nicely shown in the partner relationship between Captain Sharp and Sam). This time, the king of indie films expresses his reluctance to leave the realm of childhood and to give up the wilderness and his own nature in favour of civilisation with a strong tinge of nostalgia (which somewhat clashes with several unexpectedly grown-up scenes of youthful first love). Even his inimitable playfulness sometimes has to give way to it. The banality of some of the plot twists and character transformations, which is the result of having too many characters and the effort to appropriately reward each of them, contrasts with the incredible degree of care put into each shot. The jokes don’t scream for our attention and it perhaps isn’t even possible to catch all of them or, as the case may be, find them in the mise-en-scéne on the first viewing. Anderson is able to work with the setting with a similar imaginativeness and poetic sense of space as, for example, Jacques Tati. Unlike Tati, however, he works with smaller areas (the Bishops’ home gives the impression of a dollhouse thanks to its “fragmentation” into individual rooms) as well as panoramas of more expansive exterior spaces so that they seem very flat (perhaps like side-scrolling video games). My admiration for the meticulousness and imaginativeness with which the film was made (i.e., not made up) outweighed my enchantment this time, but even so, it is still a huge shift in my attitude, since a few years ago I ranked Anderson among the directors that I would never even remotely be friends with. 85%
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