Early in the brisk and endearing Moonrise Kingdom, when attempting to summon her four kids to dinner, Frances McDormand whips out a bullhorn. (No matter everyone’s inside the house.) Her husband (an aptly grumpy Bill Murray), gets the same treatment. They’re both lawyers, call each other nothing but “counselor” and sleep in separate beds. Their failure to communicate in any meaningful way contrasts sharply with their precocious and disturbed 12-year-old daughter Suzy (Kara Hayward), who decides to run away, pet cat in hand, with Sam (Jared Gilman), a young whippersnapper of equally unsteady emotional heft. The kind of outsiders instantly familiar to only another outsider, Suzy and Sam relate in eye-popping and exhilaratingly self-conscious fits and starts. Even his piercing her ear with a fishhook once they get to their runaway campsite seems sweetly appropriate.
The kids are alright, director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums) seems to be declaring. Even town cop Captain Sharp (a mellow Bruce Willis) admits Sam’s a lot smarter than he as Willis pours the kid a beer, obviously Dan’s first since he fails to rinse out a residue of milk still in his glass. The lone hot dog Willis serves Sam vies with the trailor park kitchen he serves it in as microcosms of Sharp’s solitary existence. Set in the fictitious town of New Penzance, Moonrise Kingdom is replete with director Wes Anderson’s penchant for period (1965) detail and craftsmanship galore. Whether you venerate Anderson’s distinct vision and trademark irony, or view his deliberate quirkiness as sometimes weary affectation, it’s impossible to consider him anything less than a magician of tone and color, a master of the moving camera, and most of all, a creator of a unique world with its own internal logic.
The shots and performances (also Tilda Swindon with a wild hairdo as “Social Services” and Edward Norton as Scout Master Ward) are so letter perfect you’re likely to put aside any concern that this can all be a somewhat airy plating for a meal of fairly ordinary ingredients. Deeper flavors come through given the just right accents and juxtapositions. Style this vivid and charming elevates Anderson’s world so well he dares the viewer not to be enmeshed in his characters. You not only care about Sam and Suzy, you can’t wait to see what they do next. He’s an orphan, she always wished she was one. After he’s “flown the coop” of his scouting group at Camp Ivanhoe, he brings flowers to meet a 45-rpm-record-player toting Suzy, who wears blue mascara. They go off to be by themselves, and utilizing all of Sam’s survival skills, they eventually dance and frolick to Francoise Hardy on a desolate beach. While the self-enclosed community awaits a landmark storm, the adults all chase after the stray, scrappy kids, and both sides learn a little from each other in the quaint old days of the 60’s.
8.5 Andersonvilles (out of 10)
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