I had hoped that working with some new actors might break Anderson out of the
overly decorated, hermetically sealed world his movies have increasingly
occcupied. But alas, despite the presence of a fine cast, Moonrise
Kingdom is one more claustrophobic journey up Anderson's ass, and it's the
last one I'll be willing to take.
The movie is the story of Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilmore and Kara Hayward),
12-year-olds living on a small island somewhere off the coast of New England.
It's 1965, and the two of them have decided to run away together. (They haven't
thought much about where they're running to, what with being on an
island and all, but then, they are only 12.)
The adults who set out to find them include Suzy's parents (Bill Murray and
Frances McDormand), Sam's scout master (Edward Norton), and the local sheriff
(Bruce Willis). And because Sam is an orphan, there's also a bureaucrat (Tilda
Swinton) on hand, a woman so efficient that she has dispensed with even her own
name; she's addressed only as "Social Services."
Swinton's performance is quite lovely; she's got a crisp humor that brings
the movie to life during her brief moments on screen. Had the rest of the cast
matched her tone and energy, the movie could have been delightful. But everyone
is so mannered and stiff that they cease to be people, and become mere objects
to be positioned in Anderson's oh-so-precise visual compositions.
There are scattered moments in the movie that work splendidly -- a brief
conversation between Murray and McDormand about the hurt they've caused one
another, a beautifully staged church production of Britten's Noye's
Fludde -- but the relationship between the two kids cripples the movie.
It's creepily over-sexualized, and that's only made worse by the fact that he
looks younger than his age and she looks older than hers.
I did like Alexandre Desplat's score, which is primarily supplemented by the
unlikely combination of Britten and Hank Williams. But the movie as a whole is
so mannered, so antiseptic, so pressed under glass, that no life can escape from
it. There was a time when Wes Anderson was one of our most promising directors;
now, he's just one of our most depressingly predictable.
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