What I like the most about Wes Anderson’s movies is their strong personality, each shot screams the name of their author, and each scene is so meticulously orchestrated with so many delightful details, you cannot miss you are watching a Wes Anderson’s film. Plus the recurrence of some characters and even certain actors (in this last case Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray are back) makes the whole experience familiar and intimate.
'Moonrise Kingdom' is certainly another exclusive adventure inside Anderson’s colorful and fantasy universe, populated by his famously eccentric characters and especially two children Sam and Suzy, two ‘troubled’ children, who fall in love with each other, revolt against the adult world and run away from their families.
During the summer of 1965, on the imaginary Island of New Penzance off the New England coast, Sam Shakusky, an orphan who is enrolled in a Khaki Scout summer camp led by Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), has made a secret pact with Suzy Bishop through a long epistolary correspondence. Suzy, who lives with her dysfunctional family – the mother uses a megaphone to communicate with her children – and never goes anywhere without her binoculars, agrees to flee with Sam the next summer. The two had met a year ago at the local church, during a performance of Noye’s Fludde (Noah’s Flood), an opera by Benjamin Britten, and this is quite important because Britten’s music is abundantly used during the movie, and plays a central role throughout the story.
The two kids run in the wilderness in a super-organized manner, spending their days hiking, camping and fishing, and even French kissing during a cute scene with Françoise Hardy’s ‘le temps de l’Amour’ for soundtrack, Suzy’s ultimate desert island song, that she packed with a record player she took from her brother, some books she stole from the public library, and her kitten.
A search for the kids is organized by the local police, led by Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), Scout Master Ward, and Suzy's parents Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand). The kids are found after they have reached a secluded cove on the island, and they are told they will never see each other again, Suzy is forced to return with her parents, whereas Sam is about to be sent in an orphanage by the social services because his foster parents do not want him anymore. Of course the story does not stop there, and the two young lovers will reunite again, thanks to the other scouts, and a violent storm flooding the area, which makes the connection with Britten’s opera at the beginning of their story.
Suzy (Kara Hayward) is like a young Gwyneth Paltrow (Margot Tenenbaum in 'The Royal Tenenbaums') as she shares with her the inner revolt, the borderline depressive and serious nature and a taste for strong eyeliner, Sam (Jared Gilman) is a younger Jason Schwartzman (Max Fisher in 'Rushmore'), who has a true romantic idea of love, and Bill Murray is the usual grumpy old man, who doesn’t know how to love his wife and family.
The unique and golden-light look of the movie is fascinating, especially the David-Crocket-style scout camp, the adventure-island cartoonish maps, and the slow camera movements making us discover the lighthouse where Suzy’s family lives.
Throughout the movie, the music is constantly played, especially Benjamin Britten’s, as soon as the first scene, when Suzy’s three little brothers are listening to Britten’s ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the orchestra’, a narrated piece during which the different instrument parts are separated, identified and then reunited together, a sort of metaphor for the rest of the movie. Also, the use of many Hank Williams’ country songs during the scene with the solitary policeman played by Bruce Willis (who had an affair with Suzy’s mother) contrasts with the omnipresent classical music.
Now this is a movie set up in 1965, and the song of French chanteuse Françoise Hardy is the only use of 60s music, but definitively not a song young Americans were listening to at the time. Wes Anderson deliberately avoids American or even British music of the 60s, whereas the soundtracks for his other movies are filled with songs from the Kinks, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Van Morrison,… this time he has made a sort of opera: beside Britten, there is Mozart and Schubert, there is this strange geographer and unnamed character, who appears from time to time to comment on the situation or the weather, as a chorus in a tragedy/opera would do, and there is this violent deus-ex-machina storm at the end of the film.
With these two supposedly ‘troubled kids’, who are in fact so serious about saving their love, so determined to find their lost paradise (the idyllic cove on the island) as some pioneers following an old Indian trail, and so in charge of their future (they even get married at the scout camp), Wes Anderson has made a modern classic.