Film review

Wes Anderson (2012)

Wes Anderson should make animated films more often.  Fantastic Mr Fox was an unexpectedly rich pleasure but the ingeniously detailed Moonrise Kingdom is not the first of his live-action movies to be unsatisfying in its elaborate superficiality.  Set in 1965, it centres on the absconding-cum-elopement of two children, from their very different homes in New England.  Sam Shakusky is an orphan:  his current foster father has had enough of him and Sam is friendless in the scout troop whose camp he disappears from.   Suzy Bishop is the only girl among the four children of her miserably married lawyer parents (her three brothers are a chorus of clones).   Moonrise Kingdom seems to be about escaping from childhood isolation while at the same time postponing the adulthood in which the grown-ups around Sam and Suzy are unhappy.  (I don’t know the explanation of the film’s title but it brought to mind ‘the moon that is always rising’ from the last stanza of ‘Fern Hill’.)   The appearance of the Bishop family home, not unlike that of their screen predecessors the Tenenbaums, is arrestingly peculiar.  In the film’s overture and conclusion, the camera moves from room to room of this doll’s house; in each room, there’s a person or group of people in designedly eccentric attitudes or occupations.  Music is an important element of Moonrise Kingdom, principally Benjamin Britten although there’s other classical music and a burst of yé-yé (Françoise Hardy) at one point.  Pleasing though the Britten is, it’s typical of Anderson that the playing of ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ is nearly overshadowed by the sarcastic effect of the commentary on the recording, which explains the piece.  I wish we’d left the cinema before this is echoed, during the closing credits, by the voice of Jared Gilman, who plays Sam, analysing the component parts of Alexandre Desplat’s original music for the film.

There’s the odd bit in Moonrise Kingdom that’s appealing because it’s something you recognise or at least rings true – like the children in animal costumes queuing up to take their places in the ark for a school production of ‘Noye’s Fludde’.  (The onstage flood waves are fun too, even if this is quite a set for a junior school in the mid-1960s.)  Most of the time, however, Anderson’s rococo archness is very limiting.  The actors voicing the puppet animals in Fantastic Mr Fox expressed a vitality and comic urgency that’s missing here.  The film is weightless without being light-hearted and the physically spectacular bits (there’s an all-stops-out storm at its climax to complement the biblical flood) amount to little because there’s little at stake.  I struggle to write much about Moonrise Kingdom at all.  When I saw the trailer I was worried for the cat that appeared in it, because of what happens to dogs in Anderson movies.  In the event, the focus is, after all, on a terrier, which doesn’t feature in the trailer and which goes the way of all Anderson canines.  The moment is more immediately physically upsetting than usual but at least the terrible image is over with pretty early.  I think this is about as much depth as Moonrise Kingdom achieves.

In his highly enthusiastic review of the film in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane refers to ‘Andersonland, where deadpan is the default’.  This is what I find irritating about the territory – I’m all for comic underplaying but the effect here is monotonous.  It’s a pleasant surprise that Bruce Willis, as the police captain leading the hunt for the missing children, is gentle and touchingly amusing.  Frances McDormand, as Mrs Bishop, transmutes her native eagerness as a performer effectively but Bill Murray, as her husband, has a dry melancholy that’s too familiar.  The caricatural brio of Tilda Swinton, as a character known only as Social Services, is bracing in this company.  She’s been given an oddly eyecatching hairdo and the hat on her uniform looks like a Salvation Army bonnet but the only time I nearly laughed was when she marched into a room to upbraid Willis and Edward Norton, as the hapless scoutmaster.   Norton is good but he deserves more opportunity to show depth – he’s touching when, stripped of his badge of office, he flinches with acute shame.  Anderson, though, seems more interested in poking mild, predictable fun at the character (when Sam disappears, the scoutmaster exclaims, ‘Jiminy cricket – he flew the coop!’).   As Norton’s bellicose senior in the scouting hierarchy, Harvey Keitel is too aware of himself as a well-known actor, who’s not well known for comedy, being comical.   Jason Schwartzman is a contrasting cool scout and Bob Balaban provides a droll on-screen narration.   The two kids are certainly singular although I found it hard to make out a lot of what they were saying – not a matter of volume but their untrained voices are fuzzy.  As Suzy, Kara Hayward’s strangeness seems more absorbed than Jared Gilman’s.  As with so much in this tiresomely witty movie, the latter’s oddball quality is largely a matter of visual design.

27 May 2012