Moonrise Kingdom

Jan 15, 2012 No Comments by WLM[mty]

SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

Moonrise Kingdom

We’ve barely gotten our foot in 2012’s door when along comes my first
“ooh” trailer of the year. The mighty Wes Anderson is back with his
new movie Moonrise Kingdom, his first since 2009’s animated The
Fantastic Mister Fox. Co-written with Roman Coppola, it is the tale of
two kids who fall in love and run away together, forcing the town’s
community to mount a search for them just as a huge storm is
approaching the small island they live on. The child leads are new to
cinema but the fantastic adult cast includes Bruce Willis, Frances
McDormand and Edward Norton alongside Anderson regulars Bill Murray
and Jason Schwartzman (just something about the idea of Bruce Willis
being injected into a Wes Anderson world makes me want to giggle like
a small female child).

Anderson’s detractors have long accused his films of being distant
and pretentious and his highly formal and symmetrical visual
compositions (as well as his use of devices such as title cards and
the like) do indeed make him an acquired taste. But don’t we want
filmmakers that are gonna surprise us and offer us something different
from the usual? Ninety-nine percent of young filmmakers who want to
make their mark choose to go the handheld, rough and ready route,
shocking us awake with their gritty visuals and cutting edge
soundtracks.

Then along comes Wes with his sense of “everything in it’s
right place” in regards to shot composition and a love of sixties
British Invasion bands and old film soundtracks (Tarantino’s hipper
than thou compilation tape soundtracks get more attention, but
Anderson has him beat hands down when it comes to knowing how to use
pre-existing music in film…) I believe that his critics – and boy
can some of them be mean! – get it wrong when they portray Anderson as
a stiff, aloof observer of human woes with no genuine compassion for
the gallery of freaks and oddballs that he has created. To me,
Anderson’s damaged – or sometimes outright broken – characters, are
what bring his films to life. I think of the sadness that runs through
so many of his creations – as played out by Bill Murray as Herman
Blume in Rushmore (1998) or Luke Wilson as Richie in The Royal
Tenenbaums (2001) – and I don’t know how I could fail to feel for
them. I sometimes wonder if the aloofness that is often attributed to
him is rather a reflection of the critic’s own deeply buried
misanthropy; I’ve never gotten the feeling that he cares more about
the set decoration or camera placement than character development or
that he was laughing at his characters, even when they are being
(admittedly, at times) ridiculous. The fact that he seems to care
about these things equally has to be admitted, but it’s the taking of
these elements as a whole that makes it what it is; without the
balance of all these things, of eye and ear and of brain and heart, it
just wouldn’t be a Wes Anderson film.

Now, I have admitted to being an Anderson fan but his last live action
effort – 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited – left me a little cold. I felt
uninvolved in the film and I found it hard to care about the plight of
the three brothers at its centre. For the first time I seemed to
understand where Anderson’s critics were coming from; the characters
were unsympathetic, their quest unimportant to me and I left the
cinema feeling like I had watched an empty spectacle (something kinda
similar happened to me during The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
[2004]; although I was enjoying the film as the highly stylised comedy
I expected it to be, I became troubled about halfway through when I
realised that the film hadn’t really drawn me in emotionally. Then
Zissou located his fabled Jaguar Shark and – to my surprise – I found
I had tears rolling down my face. Seems like it had worked on me after
all…) In hindsight it seems clear that Darjeeling was an attempt by
Anderson to shake himself up, to leave his studio-bound comfort zone,
go to India and inject some real world vibrancy and grit into the
increasingly sealed off world he was operating in. And yet, to me, he
seemed unready, almost too fearful of letting too much of the world
in. Why choose to go all that way and endure the hardships of location
shooting in a foreign country only to make your most emotionally
closed off movie yet? As is the prerogative of the fan I decided -
probably unfairly – that it must be co-writer Roman Coppola’s fault
(after all, Wes never had this problem with Owen Wilson, did he?).

The fact that – like Darjeeling – Moonrise is Kingdom is also co-written
by Roman Copolla is maybe slightly taking the shine off my excitement
a tad, but the trailer shows a full on Wes Anderson Joint and no
mistake. From the French song that backs it (I don’t know it but I’ll
bet dollars to donuts that it’s been taken from another film) to the
shots of the cast, landscape and props, all of which occupy the dead
centre of the frame throughout nearly all of it, it just screams
Anderson from the first second to the last. There’s just one thing…

Is it too fan-boy purist of me to want the old Wes Anderson typeface back?