Review: Moonrise Kingdom

I’m getting olderI have had two separate surgeries, one on my elbow and one on my knee, and two other that I’m putting off. I’ve grown up and as time has passed my interests have shifted from G.I. Joe and the Disney afternoon to The Atlantic and Mad Men. Things change; it’s a constant in life and art, which is why I’m a bit confused by the new critical darling by Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom. I fear that Anderson, like Peter Pan, is no longer growing up.

The biggest disappointment of Anderson’s new movie, Moonrise Kingdom, hereafter, MK, is that its central thematic element is that now old Anderson cliché of teenage naivete making adult wisdom or experience appear foolish by comparison.  While charming at first, Anderson’s well is running a bit dry. For starters, anyone who has gone through adolescence knows that the naivete, which Anderson often couches as a certain purity or innocence, is really a mask for inexperience, or, to be blunt, outright stupidity. Anderson has developed a tic of equating that innocence with some sort of transcendence. And though it often provides comedic fodder, in this, Anderson’s seventh film, I’d like to get the sense that he is also growing up. As good old Corinthians puts it: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. I won’t be as strict as Corinthians, I grew up loving Adam Sandler movies, but I think that Anderson sells himself, and thus the viewer, a bit short in MK.  The layered complexity of his earlier films, Royal Tenenbaums especially, is depressingly absent, or at the very least a mere ghost, rather than flesh and blood in MK.

The movie is not, despite my above caveats, disappointing or without moments of genuine humor. The characters, scout master played by Ed Norton, Bill Murray as an aging attorney, Bruce Willis as the one cop in town, are all quirky and interesting enough to keep the movie afloat, though the real stars of the movie are the two teenagers, Sam and Lily, who fall in love and run away together. The falling in love is understated, as it always is in Anderson, and tinged with an innocence that makes his movies unique and often infuriating. William Shakespeare, nearly six hundred years ago, wrote about teenage love in a more transgressive way. But that passionate sort of love is not what Anderson is interested in. No. What Anderson is most interested in in MK is Wes Anderson, or at least the idea of Wes Anderson that has grown up around his oeuvre. This is a problem. Because it turns out that Wes Anderson directing a movie exactly as Wes Anderson would do it based on his previous work, is not nearly as interesting as Wes Anderson approaching new and interesting material, or re-plumbing the depths of death or depression in his own unique way. MK skims along the surface, and the audience rides along behind the boat, blithely waving to the driver that he is going the perfect speed to keep everything just fine.

I should probably have started this essay by saying that I’m an unabashed Wes Anderson fan. In preparation for watching MK, I re-watched The Royal Tenenbaums, hereafter, RT, and confirmed that it was a dark, funny, sad, and intriguing movie worth watching with people you love, especially those with the same blood, once every few years. The people in RT are stranger than us, more neurotic or addicted, but in them we recognize ourselves, not in a trite manner, what we recognize is the brokenness of spirit that is preached about in the Gospels, or that a person feels when watching the night fade to blue in solitude, and we realize that it is the ones we love, as in RT, that hold the ends of the strings that bind us together.

The essential strangeness of Tenenbaums, the quirkiness that pervades all Anderson’s movies is more charming in this earlier iteration, precisely because it’s novel, like the first glance shared with a beautiful woman across a room. By now we’ve been dating Anderson for a few years, the bloom is off the rose, and we’d like to hear what other stories he has to tell. We’ve seen the overhead shots, the random cataloguing of items by a narrator, had characters boiled down to their few overriding proclivities, felt the keenness of the teenage naivete that we’ve all left behind with varying degrees of sadness. And now, like in all relationships, we want more.

What Moonrise Kingdom lacks is any indication that Mr. Anderson is growing in wisdom or depth as he ages. The essential key to the RT comes in the last third of the movie when Royal’s cancer is exposed as fraudulent, Richie attempts suicide, and Royal’s eventual trip back into the good graces of the family after saving Chas’ children from an out of control car driven by a drug addled Owen Wilson. In short, shit happens: the sort of shit that hangs narrative together. In RT, the quirkiness, the benign sort of innocence exuded by characters or the narration, becomes more poignant as its reflected through the prism of their terrifically complex and sad lives. If Anderson has a second great theme, and one that I’m more intuiting than I feel grabbing expressly from his movies—it is the satire of our essential natures, our willingness to forgo all to behave as the children we once were, and always will be. In this viewing Anderson is less a funny director and more of a social satirist. We’re not talking Voltaire here, but perhaps this is as close as we’ll get to a modern equivalent that people actually watch. Ultimately there is a sort of pleasure that’s weirdly disconcerting in recognizing ourselves in the futile lives of Anderson’s characters.

Moonrise Kindgom lacks the punch of RT, because it almost assiduously avoids the heavy themes of depression, divorce, drug addiction that wind up making watching RT, and still finding it pleasant and funny, like being guided expertly through a series of rapids with a blindfold on. You’re not sure how it happened, but you’re impressed nonetheless. It is a wonder that so much carefree laughter and intense caring can be almost paradoxically wedded as they are in RT.  Moonrise Kingdom dispenses with these adult themes in favor of Anderson’s more lasting theme of adolescent naivete teaching adults the values that they’ve lost. This theme which shone brightly in Rushmore is well worn in by the time we see MK. The problem is that the adolescent problems really do wind up seeming innocuous in the grander scope of things. Therefore, the laughter which comes unbidden in RT, is of a canned sort in MK, a force of effort. The film lacks a certain effervescent quality of humor. The audience does not leave the theater wondering about the fate of the child lovers, or their families, but rather, with a vague sense of having been slightly amused.

The movie is not a failure by any means. Ed Norton plays a bewildered and good spirited scout master with aplomb. Bruce Willis as a good hearted cop is a strange and fun turn for people of my age, who grew up watching him say yippe kiyo kiya mother fucker to the Russian terrorists in Die Hard. It is clear that Willis, at least in this movie, has mellowed with time, though I’d like to believe he could still storm an office building. Bill Murray is his usual excellent and depressed self. The two children in the movie, Sam and Lily, do a good job playing the roles they are asked to play. So why does this well acted, quintessentially Anderson movie feel so empty at its core?

The plot turns on a young boy and girl, who are twelve or thirteen, falling in love and planning to run away together into the wilderness. The boy turns out to be an orphan, the girl, a mini version of Gwyneth Paltrow from RT. A large search party is sent out to find them comprised of the quiet cop Willis, the bemused scout master Norton, and a band of angry boy-scout brethren. The group of scouts is brief comedic fodder, carrying rocks and sticks to catch Sam, played by Jared Gilman, who has resigned from their ranks.  The chase is set against the shy courtship between the two teens. This is no Twilight, though we do have an awkward and unnecessary feeling up scene. These teens have just left childhood behind and have miles to go before they become adults. The courtship is awkward in the way that all Anderson courtships are awkward, which serves as a reminder that the teenage years are strange, and probably better left behind.  

And perhaps that’s the trick that Wes Anderson is now pulling: he’s making movies for kids and getting adults to watch them. Perhaps he has lost interest in the themes of RT, or even of wanderlust and life crises that are a part of Dar Jeeling Limited. Perhaps he’s been making the same movie over and over again since Rushmore, and it’s only now that I’m seeing it. This is a movie about being a teenager. It’s not particularly interested in adults, except as foils for the teenagers. And I suppose that’s why the movie is so damn depressing to watch as an adult, because being a teenager is very much about trying to figure out how to be an adult, and simultaneously looking to them for queues and somehow trying to despise and emulate them all at once. It’s about trying to find some way of looking longingly at a girl without her noticing, singing along to some crappy song and feeling the carpet fibers under your back more intently than you’ve been touched, holding hands and feeling your heart flutter, or borrowing a room to have sex for the first time. It’s about the overwhelming sexual feelings that arise when you see a woman coupled with the warnings of your health professor about pregnancy and AIDS. It is less about certainty, except as an act, than about exploring, as a child does, walking from room to room in search of something that will never be found. And, to take this inherent complexity, and boil it down as MK does, is just too damn simple, and it makes the movie seem inconsequential, a thing to be laughed at and quickly forgotten.  

The love between Sam and Lily, though it’s important to them, is just not all that important to a viewer watching it as an adult. Perhaps if I viewed if I was able to find the right prism, it might make more sense. I feel I’m being asked to understand their love as transcendent in the sense that it is real and fierce, making a mockery of the lack of seriousness that adults often give in their relationships, and simultaneously, sweet. While I can see both points, they come up seeming rather hollow in this movie, which is more interested in the perfection of quirk than heart.

 And, for that matter, being thirteen was nothing like that. And then one begins to doubt all of the Anderson oeuvre, begins to think that all of his movies have only been about being thirteen, and that they aren’t about critiquing our culture, our essential  me centric society, or softening the blow of aging, but of just perpetually being a child in need of love. And then, perhaps it is a story, like the story of our own creation, or a God who demands the sacrifice of an only son, that we must tell ourselves again and again.  And perhaps there is something profound in Anderson’s need to tell us that story again and again. But if I had to wager a guess I’d say that he’s just run out of steam.

In the end Moonrise Kingdom is not so much a failure as a failure to adhere to an earlier higher standard. Is it fair to ask Wes Anderson for more? Compared to the majority of the summer fare,  Avengers included, Moonrise Kingdom is an interesting film. It does not rely on special effects or tired story lines to draw in an audience, rather, the appeal is the strangeness. And even if that’s become a tic, it’s still uniquely Andersonian. And yet, to quote the King James edition from Luke: For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. I think it’s fair to say that Anderson set a very high bar with RT, and it is now his job to attempt to clear it. Moonrise Kingdom feels less like an attempt, because I’ll grant that many artists fail, than a veering off at the last second as though he’d gotten his steps wrong. I can forgive a failure. I cannot forgive the lack of an attempt.

Moonrise is a pale reflection of the idea of Wes Anderson that’s arisen over the years. I realize that our very small society of those interested in the arts now values actors and directors for their ability to adapt, to change with time, and that that is concept is only a fairly recent development in cinema and literature. Nobody wanted Sherlock Holmes to suddenly become a wizard, or Clark Gable to not be handsome and charming. They played certain roles and that was familiar. But, as I age, and filmmaker’s and artists along with me, I’d like to imagine that they are changing as well, seeing the world in new ways, continuing to see the major themes of death, loss, and love in new and changing lights. I want to imagine that if they sat upon a shoreline for an entire day that they’d notice a change in the quality of the light, late summer’s eve, the blue or the attenuated quality, not report back that the light lay on the water all day. I think Wes Anderson is capable of making a better film, and I hope that in the future he sees fit to try.