Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.
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36 films that influenced Moonrise Kingdom
What critics say influenced Moonrise Kingdom
But Anderson handles it with a sensitivity and an unembarrassed openness that evoke the style of François Truffaut, in classics such as The 400 Blows and Small Change.
The film certainly owes a debt to the crafty kid imps of The 400 Blows and Small Change (by one of Anderson's avowed heroes, François Truffaut) but on the evidence of his artful and electric action direction, Anderson might work wonders with a throwback thriller in the vein of his hero's hero: Alfred Hitchcock.
“Moonrise Kingdom” is Wes Anderson’s seventh feature film, and in some ways it’s typical of all of them, with tropes and tics and themes and actors familiar from the likes of “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” and the rest.
But as the film follows the story of two emotionally deprived 12-year olds just precocious enough to fall in love - Suzy, the Bishops’ oldest child, and Sam, an orphaned scout – it’s impossible not to recall how much more affecting Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums was in its depiction of an emotionally fraught eccentric family, or how his Fantastic Mr. Fox was more attuned to the joy of imagination.
In many ways, their relationship recalls the star-crossed romance between Margo and Richie Tenenbaum, the relationship at the heart of The Royal Tenenbaums.
This one is neither as contrived as The Royal Tenenbaums nor as moronic as The Darjeeling Limited, but its boredom quotient is still stuck in the same unbroken wave of dubious tedium Mr. Anderson is famous for.
Set on a New England island in the summer of 1965, the opening sequence of Moonrise Kingdom, with its incessant camera-pans around the Bishop household, recalls the stylistic choices made in both The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
It combines elements of Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Fantastic Mr. Fox into a whole that is fresh, exciting, sweet and, most of all, gentle.
But Anderson handles it with a sensitivity and an unembarrassed openness that evoke the style of François Truffaut, in classics such as The 400 Blows and Small Change.
The film certainly owes a debt to the crafty kid imps of The 400 Blows and Small Change (by one of Anderson's avowed heroes, François Truffaut) but on the evidence of his artful and electric action direction, Anderson might work wonders with a throwback thriller in the vein of his hero's hero: Alfred Hitchcock.
Despite the absurdly all-American backdrop, the film reveals a particularly French influence in its use of composer Alexandre Desplat's sprightly instrumentations and its admirably non-patronizing approach toward adolescents, which recalls the precocious protags of Louis Malle's "Murmur of the Heart" and "Zazie in the Metro."
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Thus this wise and charming live-action cartoon evokes the bittersweet moments of childhood where the two youngsters fling themselves into an adventure of their own making filled with fights, captures, escapes and even a ersatz wedding right up there with “It Happened One Night” for on-the-road romance.
The fable is a peewee reworking of Summer with Monika set in the year of Pierrot le Fou, acted out by a moon-faced, lisping boy who resembles Sartre in a coonskin-cap and a grave nymphet whos forever bringing binoculars to her raccoon eyes.
The duo's " The Red Shoes ," " I Know Where I'm Going! ," " A Canterbury Tale " and so many more were examples of what Powell called "the composed film," a movie in which each element was worked out to meticulously mesh with the other, a movie in which all of the art forms that inform movies -- painting, music, theater, sculpture, the whole lot -- are brought to bear with equal emphasis, a movie in which the contours of the real and the fantastic rub freely against each other to produce ... well, hopefully a kind of aesthetic alchemy.
There have been any number of films over the years following a couple of precociously young children falling in love in a disarmingly adult manner (at least tonally)--there was a particularly delightful one from George Roy Hill entitled "A Little Romance" with a then-unknown and impossibly young Diane Lane as the girl and Laurence Olivier as the avuncular old guy who helps them along the way.
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Their “Black Narcissus” comes to mind when the island is scoured for the runaway kids in a medium-long tableau of three figures that includes a barefoot nun in a knee-length white shift: who is she, why is she dressed so formally and so casually?
The duo's " The Red Shoes ," " I Know Where I'm Going! ," " A Canterbury Tale " and so many more were examples of what Powell called "the composed film," a movie in which each element was worked out to meticulously mesh with the other, a movie in which all of the art forms that inform movies -- painting, music, theater, sculpture, the whole lot -- are brought to bear with equal emphasis, a movie in which the contours of the real and the fantastic rub freely against each other to produce ... well, hopefully a kind of aesthetic alchemy.