Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Director: Wes Anderson

 Children want to grow up. Adults want to become kids again. This is what Wes Anderson's newest film is primarily about. It's not something new to his films (you can read my examination of his whole filmography here), but it's done better in this film than before. The two idealistic kids in this film who elope together believe they are in love and are mature enough to take the world on. The two kids seem to act more like adults than the actual adults in the movie. The adults that are looking for them are sad and filled with melancholy. They're fed up and yearn to go back to the innocent days of their youth when they believed in things like love. Moonrise Kingdom is a movie filled with sadness through its adult characters, but through the younger characters we see hope and idealism. Getting these two disparate elements to work together in the same film is a perfect example of what makes Anderson such a marvelous filmmaker.

Anderson displays this all with his trademark idiosyncratic style, and he can get away with it in this film more so than previous ones because of the time period and the fact that it's set in a pretty small town, and small towns have a knack for being idiosyncratic in their own ways. The cutesy Godardian style also fits the storybook aesthetic and substance of the film, as our two lovebird characters share a storybook love. Anderson displays that love through some marvelously humorous but oddly beautiful moments between the two. Anderson has a knack for drawing you in with his unique sense of style, and keeping you invested through the real and affecting characters. This is a film that Anderson gets completely right. The writing, the visual style, the acting, and even the music is all flawless, and they converge together as whole as well as any Anderson film has to date.

Grade: A-

The Substance of Wes Anderson

I recently re-watched all of Wes Anderson's films in preparation for his new one, Moonrise Kingdom. Naturally after watching his movies I desired to understand them more and read what others had to say about them. Going through reviews and message boards I was a little disappointed. I had seen all of Anderson's films already, and so his unique idiosyncratic style was something I was quite used to, on this second viewing I wanted to see if there was much substance behind the style. Unfortunately, I found that there was little to no discussion about the substance, subtext, and themes of Anderson, all discussion surrounding him are usually about his visual style (ironic, considering that most mainstream film discussion avoids style, but with Anderson's very obvious-than-normal style this is not surprising). Granted, there are film critics who have revolved their film reviews on his themes on occasion, but film reviews are not the same as film discussion. So this is why this post exists. I wanted to contribute to the discussion by writing almost completely about the themes in the films of Wes Anderson. As you'll see, in addition to having a distinct visual style, Anderson also has very distinct themes present in all his films.