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‘Moonrise Kingdom’

Odd and quirky, with a touch of heart

By Adam Grybowski
THE title of Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s new movie, refers to a section of the fictional island New Penzance, off the coast of Rhode Island, where Suzy Bishop and Sam Shakusky, two 12-year-old runaways in love (played by newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman), escape the confines of their sad family lives.
   An angry adolescent, Suzy wears dark eye makeup, a short pink dress, knee socks and Sunday school shoes (though she wouldn’t call them that), and her anger occasionally expresses itself through acts of violence. She finds solace in Sam, a resourceful scout whose exterior and defiant bravado contain everything he needs for him to act like an adult. Or at least what he conceives to be adult.
   Suzy and Sam had met a year earlier — during a performance of the opera, Noye’s Fludde by Benjamin Britten — and arranged their trip through correspondence, the text of which Anderson shows time and again. He loves showing letters and postcards and books on film, cutting to handwritten words as the narrator — in this instance, Bob Balaban, often onscreen and addressing the camera — guides us through the story.
   What do these two adolescents bring to survive their adventure? Wearing a coonskin cap and peering through glasses, Sam takes care of the camping supplies, while Suzy’s luggage includes library books, her basket-traveling kitten and a record player. Anderson commissioned individual artists to create the art for Suzy’s books, and he released on the Internet a short movie about them as he similarly did for “Hotel Chevalier,” the short movie that accompanied The Darjeeling Limited.
   Among Suzy’s books is a pamphlet called “Coping With the Very Troubled Child,” something she found at home, and she knows that it refers to her. Suzy’s parents, both lawyers, are played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, who refer to each other as “counselor.” They’re minor characters struggling with a strained relationship — the core of a dysfunctional family, which is the true subject of every Anderson movie.
   Anderson’s antidote to fractured blood families seems to be created families or families within a family, small societies marked by their own uniforms, rules, customs, art. Think of Team Zissou or Ben Stiller’s tracksuit-wearing clan or The Rushmore Academy. In Moonrise, Suzy and Sam attempt to create their own world as a salve for families ruined by parents they hate or, in the case of orphaned Sam, don’t have.
   Murray’s scenes are as odd and deadpan as ever. At one point he exits his front door and walks into the yard carrying an axe and a bottle of liquor. Shirtless, he addresses his kids by saying, “I’m going to find a tree to cut down.”
   That oddness usually acts to distance me from the emotional lives of Anderson’s characters, but here he drew me in, handling the awkward sexuality of the kids with sweetness and humor. Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson’s most romantic work, and instead of simply looking from afar at the fantastic world he has created, I felt a part of it and connected to it by the way its artful construction stirred my own memories of adolescent crushes and, yes, even love.
   And the fully imagined, highly stylized world of Moonrise Kingdom is fantastic, dominated by saturated greens and yellows and browns that feel grainy and nostalgic. Set in 1965, the movie refers to historical details not at all, except for its analog equipment — the spinning turntable, rotating audio tape and walkie-talkies the size of bread loaves. If Anderson ever makes a movie set in the future, the characters of that world, I’m convinced, will still not have discovered the digital universe.
   McDormand is wonderful as always but has less to work with than the other newcomers to Anderson’s movie family. Bruce Willis is terrific in a quiet but key role — perfectly underplayed — as the island’s lone police officer. The tunes of Hank Williams soundtrack his life, and the singer’s tales of disappointment and pain and longing underscore the character’s loneliness and heartache.
   Edward Norton appears as an earnest and lonely Khaki Scout leader — the Khaki Scouts being Anderson and fellow screenwriter Roman Coppola’s version of the Boy Scouts. Norton’s Rockwellesque scoutmaster, charged to oversee the troop, nearly loses control of them as well as his job, until the third and final section of the movie, when the appearance of a Shakespearean rainstorm and institutional authoritarian played by Tilda Swinton heighten the drama and the fun of a daring rescue operation.
   It’s also in Moonrise’s final section that you see the effect Anderson’s previous movie, the wonderful stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox, has had on him. The action takes on a cartoon quality and logic. And I think this is the key to finding joy instead of irritation in Anderson’s movies. His off-kilter realism may never have been meant to be realistic at all. I’m beginning to see Anderson as a creator of storybook worlds like ours but not, worlds full of pain and pathos that are meant not to represent life but — through his peculiar art — to transcend it.
   Moonrise Kingdom contains all the signature Anderson touches you either love or hate — the deadpan humor, the dollhouse sets, the dolly pans — but adds a degree of urgency and romanticism and warmth to the drama I haven’t felt in his previous works. I left the theater exhilarated.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content and smoking. 94 minutes.