Film Carew: Moonrise Kingdom

In Wes Anderson's world, prodigal children grow up to be unhappy adults; early eccentricities becoming behavioural prisons; youthful quirks turning emotional problems. In his family saga The Royal Tenenbaums, he explores this path in a narrative continuum; looking at the children of the titular family as both buoyant, confident kids and fractured, tortured adults, siblings bound by both their high-achiever childhoods and their depressed adulthoods. It's the one moment in which Anderson —in what stands as his sole 'saga'— makes this rites-of-passage embodied in single characters; usually, he catches people somewhere on that path, or highlights the divide. And never is the divide quite so striking as with Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson's seventh —and best— feature; a film that easily eclipses The Royal Tenenbaums as his magnum opus.

This is a tale of young love; of a pair of idealistic, daydreamy, rebellious 12-year-olds who chose to flee from the world of unhappy adults, running away from their homes on a tiny New England island (New Penzance Island!) to an isolated cove they dub Moonrise Kingdom; but, really, taking a flight of fantasy into their own imaginations, and taking a refractory leap towards their own independence (and, in somewhat the bittersweet twist, the first steps towards their own unhappiness). Anderson is oft dismissed —by the kind of people fond of explosions, mostly— as being too precious, too twee, too whimsical; yet his meticulously-stylised cinematic fantasies don't shy away from deep emotion. When boy meets girl, there's no condescension from the director's chair: it is love at first sight, terrifying and thrilling, hot and urgent and overwhelming. The film is set in the '60s and plays with notions of memory —both personal and cultural— but there's no grown-up revisionism cast back on the feelings of incipient adolescence; no judgment on the cluelessness of youth, no attempt to play down passions not tempered by the clarity, the realism, of adult understanding. Anderson understands that the lack of reality —the essential fantasy— of first love doesn't make it less profound for those feeling it, but more profound; and his misty, watercoloured storybook is a romance less romantic than defiant, standing at odds with a culture —with a world of adults— who would seek to diminish it.

When these star-cross'd lovers meet —and not meet-cute— in a brilliantly-edited piece of artful backstory-insertion, it comes backstage at a school production of Benjamin Britten's opera Noye's Fludde, giving a heightened air of theatricality to this mythical moment. In wanders Sam, a shunted-about foster-child, perpetual loner, and devotee to Scouting; a bespectacled, fastidious, big-dreamin' oddball who could easily grow up to be Max Fischer (or, y'know, the guy from Craft Spells). And he is struck by the vision of Suzy; a reluctant yet volatile girl who feels eternally out of place, only finding a sense of comfort by retreating into the fantasy worlds of exotic albums and young adult novels. The pair are played by unknowns —and actual kids— Jared Holman and , and neither acts like the typical childstar; instead of oozing creepy confidence and preternatural nous, they project a natural awkwardness that befits their characters, and the spectre of early adolescence. That such emotional clarity arrives in a pair of genuinely confused kids —Suzy's parents have left a pamphlet called Coping With The Very Troubled Child on top of the fridge— is a veritable miracle, and Anderson, respectfully, treats it as so. If love-at-first-sight comes in a flash; here the shock of lightning presages a whole storm; with the narrative progressing steadily towards a near-Biblical tempest that, as Bob Balaban giddily intones in an opening narration of odd ominiscience, will strike in but a few days time. With the clouds rolling, their young love is clearly manifest as force-of-nature; and the story eternally builds towards a climactic storm.

Along the way, there are endless sad adults; Frances McDormand and Bill Murray as Hayward's beaten-down parents; a pair of lawyers whose marriage has grown to be loveless yet functional; a legal partnership as in a legal firm. There's Bruce Willis, the pained local police chief; who moves as if weighed down by existence. Edward Norton's chipper scoutmaster projects a joy in his job, and in the properness of Scouting's pre-military training, but it's a façade masking an inner emptiness; he a bachelor on an island absent of eligible dames, a man who is easily reduced to being but a boy under any line of questioning. Their own ineffectual natures —their own absence of love— is bought into stark contrast by the runaways' elopement; and that divide between youthful idealism and adult acceptance, between rebellion and resignation, is the centre of Anderson's picture; blessing the picture with a profundity of emotion rare in cinema, and unparalleled in a filmography as notable for its dry comedy and stylised irony (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) as for its chronicles of tender, troubled familial relationships. It's, of course, a storybook for unhappy adults; with the central romance taking place in the dreamy recesses of memory, and the undeniable undercurrent of melancholy only adding to the beauty. But as much as I love Moonrise Kingdom —and unreservedly so— I get the suspicion that some worldly 12-year-old, somewhere, loves it with a obsessive ferocity that I, adult and unhappy and forever at swim in gauzy memories, could never muster. This is one of cinema's greatest ever depictions of young love, so here's to the young lovers; those kids fervently, feverishly devoted to dreams, dreamgirls, and the magnificient dreamworlds of Anderson; long may your young hearts spark fire.