' ' Cinema Romantico: Some Drivel On...Moonrise Kingdom

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Some Drivel On...Moonrise Kingdom

Of Wes Anderson’s infinite visual motifs, perhaps his most prominent is the moving diorama, turning some locale, like the Belafonte boat at the heart of “The Life Aquatic”, into something akin to a dollhouse, moving his camera from left to right, or right to left, as he walks us through every facet of his finely honed vista. In the case of “Moonrise Kingdom”, he opens with two such moving dioramas. First, through the ramshackle home of Mr. and Mrs. Bishop (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand) located on fictional New Penzance Island, off the coast of New England, and then through the camp of the Khaki Scouts of North America, located on the same island, as Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) moves from his tent to the outdoor mess hall, pausing for spot checks along the way. Each of these shots express, as they always do, Anderson’s preferred auteur-imposed order where he can show us exactly how things work in his invented worlds. Of course, look closer and you will see the encroaching sadness, whether it is Mr. and Mrs. Bishop reading the paper in different rooms right next to each other, or the lax safety standards of the Khaki Scouts, which hints at total control being just beyond Scoutmaster Ward’s reach.

What is also notable about this procession through camp is how it ends – that is, with Scoutmaster Ward discovering that 12 year Khaki Scout Sam Shutusky (Jared Gilman) has flown the coop. Sam flees, we learn, to meet up with the Bishops’ young daughter, Suzy (Kara Hayward), who we see in her own moving diorama scene where he mostly stares out the window, fitfully, through binoculars, as if yearning for what is beyond her immediate reach. They are running away, fleeing their respective natural orders where, as we have seen, not all is copacetic. That order, of course, will try to reel them back in, with the island policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) leading the chase, institutions bearing down. 

Sam and Suzy’s journey takes them to an isolated cove, where they hide out, talk and dance to old records. Whimsical might be a word that jumps to mind, but it’s notable for how Anderson repeatedly undercuts that whimsy, with Sam cruelly laughing at Suzy when she admits her parents think her troubled, only to apologize, and Sam bluntly correcting Suzy’s fanciful notions of what being an orphan is like. It’s not simply the institutions, in other words, that have driven them to leave, but the people in charge of them. But when Sam and Suzy are found, Mr. Bishop rips the tent off the top of them, he leaves them exposed, half-naked, to the world from which he, and Mrs. Bishop, were supposed to protect his daughter. Later, when lying in their conspicuously separate beds, Mrs. Bishop remarks of the two kids “We’re all they’ve got.” Mr. Bishop replies, infused with Murray’s patented droll darkness: “That’s not enough.” If they are not enough, who is?

There is another adult in “Moonrise Kingdom” – namely, The Narrator (Bob Balaban). As the movie opens, he stands before the camera to proffer a brief history of New Penzance as well as foreshadow the so-called Black Beacon Storm, “the region’s most destructive meteorological event of the second half of the twentieth century.” That this event will conclude the film, the Narrator, who briefly inserts himself into the movie halfway through, becomes something like a prophet in high water pants. And I do not employ the term “prophet” lightly. There is a Biblical undertone to “Moonrise Kingdom”, one that is slathered quite plainly across the surface but occurred to me more forcefully on a third watch, perhaps because it was Easter week when I re-watched.

Even without the presence of his prophet, Anderson foreshadows what’s to come with Sam and Suzy’s Meet Cute, taking place at a children’s production of Noye’s Fludde, a one-act Benjamin Britten opera recounting the story of Noah’s Ark. In that light, you might assume that Sam and Suzy’s escape is informed by some higher power. That is not the case, however, and while most movies might make their running away and eventual retrieval the basis for the whole movie, here the runaways are found and brought back into the fold midway through so as to keep the spotlight firmly on the entire social system supporting, or not, these kids. There is a great wave that appears near movie’ end, destroying a dam, approximating a flood at a Khaki Scout camp on a neighboring island, and while it leaves significant damage, it does not wipe everyone out. If anything, it gives them a chance to shine, like Scoutmaster Ward re-proving his worth by Khaki Scout Commander Pierce, and by Captain Sharp, agreeing it at a dramatic moment, to become Sam’s guardian.

If Wes Anderson films are often thought of as superficial, beholden to their finicky dollhouse aesthetic and little else, characters as props to pose in a movie dollhouse, in “Moonrise Kingdom”, the people, in being pointedly spared by the great flood, become the point. The great flood does not wipe the earth to leave a few to rebuild; it leaves who is there still there. The Gal or Guy upstairs is simply reminding everyone below that the well-being of this whole damn place is very much up to us.

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