Quirky Wes Anderson

You have to have a really high tolerance for quirkiness and whimsy to be a big fan of Wes Anderson's films; I don't, and therefore I'm not - but "Moonrise Kingdom" is more appealing than his other films - it's actually one of the few films aimed at a wide audience - a PG-13 film clearly hoping to draw in a preteen audience - that isn't condescending to kids, that might actually appeal to kids, and that isn't a gross-out slapstick pseudo comedy. It's actually a very sweet story about two misfit kids, boy and girl, who met almost by chance, start a secret correspondence, and then run off together, confounding most of the adults around them - they take off for the woods - a version of the pastoral - and eventually are caught but manage to maintain their friendship and fledgling love despite the obstacles. Echoes here of many adolescent escapes: notably Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but also As You Like It, Night of the Hunter, many others. What makes this film distinctive - and that will be a plus for some and a minus for others - is Anderson's unique cinematic vocabulary: nothing is actually believable about the relationship between the two or the mechanism of their escape and hiding. Just to cite one example, they seem to have enough materials with them to set up an entire wilderness campsite with tent and cooking gear and all sorts of equipment - and he's carrying just a small backpack and she's carrying a suitcase filled with books! OK, but we're not meant to actually believe in this plot - just to take each scene, each segment, at its face value. The scout camp, with Ed Norton as the scoutmaster, is odd, both lots of fun like PeeWee's funhouse, filled with weird gadgets and contraptions, and oppressive, with Norton as a martinet (though he softens over the course of the film) - not sure how to relate to that. Similarly, the home the girl escapes from - just hard to understand: her siblings totally improbably gather around a portable record player each morning to listen to Britten (year, right); the parents - Bill Murray and F. MacDormand - are crass fools, and lawyers to boot! Other than Bruce Willis as the island cop, adults are there to be loathed: who wouldn't want to run away? A more thoughtful movie would include some nuance and even some sympathy for the parents left behind, but Moonrise is all about broad strokes with bright colors, not about nuances and shading. Anderson is truly a "child" of J.D. Salinger - a world of impossibly precocious, overly sensitive, largely abandoned kids at the mercy of insufferable adults. We know where our sympathies are meant to lie - and Moonrise to me is more successful than some of his other works because the two kids are appealing and vulnerable, not troubled and snarky.