Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Jason Schwartzman 12A cert, general release, 94 min
AFTER THE relative misfires that were The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson has just about got his post-beatnik groove back with this charming, meandering fantasia on childhood. Unfortunately, he hasn’t quite escaped his overly familiar artistic limitations.
Moonrise Kingdom is certainly a lovely, lovely film. Robert Yeoman’s cinematography is awash with clean, retro colours. The use of music by Benjamin Britten abandons us in spooky woodland and leaves us to our breadcrumbs. You just wish that the piece didn’t feel so annoyingly arch. They may as well erect giant quotation marks round the screen. Or worse, post-quotation brackets.
The picture takes place in a seaside town on a pretty stretch of New England. Kara Hayward (good) and Jared Gilman (less good) play a pair of children – Suzy lives in a lighthouse and Sam serves in Ed Norton’s scout troop – who terrify their parents by eloping to the wilderness. Police officer Bruce Willis is dispatched to drag the youths back to the very civilised type of civilisation we expect from Wes Anderson. When they eventually return, however, further mayhem ensues.
Anderson has never kept secret his love of classic New Yorker cartoons: the film plays like an animated compilation of those fabulously frou-frou entertainments, right down to the head-on framing. Frances McDormand and (mandatory) Bill Murray are solidly amusing as Suzy’s squabbling parents. Tilda Swinton is grotesquely statuesque as “Social Services”. Rarely does a minute go by without the film triggering a smile, a genuine laugh or a sympathetic sigh.
The doodles do not, however, really fit together to tell a lucid story. The opening half has sufficient momentum. But the last act collapses into a mess of panicked chases and careering, unhinged flotsam.
Is it worth complaining? For the faithful, Wes Anderson is to the new millennium what Quentin Tarantino was unto the 1990s. His quirks are quintessential; his kook is canny. For these folks, Moonrise Kingdom will surely prove warmly familiar.
If, on the other hand, you loathed Anderson’s last lovely postcard from a pre-internet Salinger-inspired social class that never quite existed, then you’re just plumb out of luck with this one.
