Moonrise Kingdom

7 / 10

2012. Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton. 

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Sam and Suzy – he a khaki troop misfit and she a budding emo – have run away together to indulge their young love. They live on an island off New England so they knew they couldn’t get too far, but they must have hoped that they would have had more time to innocently boogie on the beach before the small island community found them. 

Fortunately you’re only half way through the movie when this happens and Wes Anderson still has some surprising turns in store for his two young heroes. Apart from anything else, a storm is coming. 

This is a likeable film with a sweet centre and Anderson’s trademark kooky style makes even the nothing-things funny. I mean, laughed at a series of still-shots of Bruce Willis standing on people’s porches asking them if they’d seen a missing kid. A real highlight is http://www.joblo.com/video/media/screenshot/moonrise_kingdom_penzanze.jpgthe narrator; one of those weird old guys who are as keen as for all things geography and meteorological in the place they live. 

One can, of course, make the usual complaints about Wes. It is very self- conscious. And he is copying a lot of his own earlier material. But it’s still good and so, to paraphrase the Gettysburg Address, get over it. 

For me it does two things slightly differently to the rest of the Anderson canon. 

Firstly, it made me bored for a solid 15 minute stretch at about the three-quarter mark.  I understood there had to be a flood for the Noah’s ark references to come full circle. I didn’t get why they had to faff about for so long with Harvey Keitel and the other khaki troop camp on the bigger island. It went nowhere. That sequence should have been, like Revelations, left out.

Secondly, it has a bigger heart (than, say, the otherwise far superior Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums). It nicely sketches out some of those pubescent affections other than lust (apparently there are some, who knew?) and it really shares with you that need to escape. 

Not life-changing but does fall on the enjoyable side of the ledger.

About Pecs

Pecs has no food, has no job and his pets' heads are falling off.
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