Moonrise Kingdom

Synopsis: It is 1965 and Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), a couple  of kids on the cusp of their teen years and at odds with the world fall in love and run away after they meet during their summer holidays on a small island off the coast of New England.

There are very few films that manage to balance an almost fetishistic preoccupation with style with a comparable measure of substance. With his latest offering, a marvellous melding of whimsicality, retro styling and an aching nostalgia for the lost innocence of youth, Wes Anderson has given us a labour of love that can justly be counted amongst this select group.

Moonrise Kingdom opens with a shot of a framed sampler, and this classically American folk art form very much determines the look of the film which makes use of bold colour contrasts and simple geometric forms to create a meticulously stylized look for a 1960s setting jammed packed with the kind of memorabilia that will delight any fan of the period.

It is not just the retro look of the film that is delightful however but also its retro tone. It is rather remarkable that Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola (of the Coppola dynasty) have got this so right as in many ways that tone is rooted in the 1950s and both men are only in their early forties. Thus, to return to the film’s opening, we see the Bishop children listening to a record on a plastic phonogram (a prop which will recur through the narrative) that explains for them how classical music works. The image is one of an unworldly innocence and sense of wonderment that these days, when kids of a comparable age have Smartphones and Ipads as a matter of course, has long gone. Indeed, the story of Sam and Suzy’s elopement, which occupies the first part of the film, is reminiscent of Enid Blyton’s famous Secret Seven books, admittedly peppered with some wryly grown-up humour and a franker approach to the pair's burgeoning sexuality.

It is, of course, this parenthesising of 1950s/1960s naiveté with tongue-in-cheek dryness that gives the film another layer of appeal for our older-and-wiser sensibilities. Much of this has to do with the casting. Anderson has put together a fabulous cast including Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban and good deal of pleasure is to be had simply from watching these well-known actors play their cleverly drawn off-beat characters (only Anderson regular, Bill Murray would you say is much as ever). The two children playing Sam and Suzy are also delightful. Perhaps they are good actors or perhaps they are not but their awkwardness is note perfect for the slightly skewed universe that is Moonlight Kingdom, a quirky, inventive and charming portrait of Edenic innocence vs adult pragmatism that only the stoniest of hearts will be able to resist.

 

 

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