It is perhaps fitting that Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is opening in select theaters the same week that Andrew Sarris, one of the most important film critics in American history, died at age 83.
Sarris’ legacy, immortalized in his book The American Cinema, was to apply the auteurist ideas of the 1950s French critics to such neglected American directors as Raoul Walsh, Frank Tashlin and even Alfred Hitchcock (there was a time, pre-Sarris, when Hitch was merely considered a talented showman, the P.T. Barnum of the movies).
The director, in Sarris’ view and in much of the film criticism that followed through two generations, was not a glorified craftsman in charge of a picture’s coherence; he was an artist using the medium of film to explore a world view, an agenda, a thematic preoccupation. With his deliberate choice of camera angles, his editing and casting decisions and the overarching tone of his pictures, he was saying something.
I bring this up because, of all contemporary American directors, it’s Wes Anderson who most embodies the Sarrisian auteur; he probably grew up reading The American Cinema. (If Sarris would have updated his tome for today, Anderson would probably be filed under “The Far Side of Paradise”).
Anderson’s films are intricate structures ready to be decoded on any number of levels, from stylistic to thematic. His mise-en-scènes are paragons of sumptuous symmetry and precise fluidity. Heavily storyboarded and free of spontaneity, his camera moves like an elegant machine across perfectly manicured tableaux – none of that jittery, digicam “realism” for him.
Like Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford and Sarris’ other masters, Anderson works with on-screen surrogates that appear and reappear throughout his corpus – namely Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray, who have Anderson to thank for their discovery and resurgence, respectively. And thematically, Anderson fits the auteurist mold, too.
He remains obsessed with the dynamics of dysfunctional and broken families, whether he’s dealing with the estranged offspring of a “royal” patriarch, a motley crew of damaged oceanographers or a brotherly sojourn to India. In the process, he chafes against some real filial wounds in patently unreal – and, yes, occasionally precious – milieus.
In many ways, the young-adult escapism of Moonrise Kingdom may seem to share a target audience with Anderson’s most heterogeneous movie yet, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Indeed, it can resemble a live-action cartoon, as characters escape burning buildings in superhuman bounds and recover from lighting strikes by wiping the soot off their faces and moving on. But keep looking – this film is auteurist heaven.
It’s set in 1965 in a fictional New England island called New Penzance, where there are no paved roads and where the homes and governmental offices alike resemble the simple, crude and colorful drawings of a child. Order is overseen by a single police officer, Captain Sharp, played with persistent bemusement by Bruce Willis, whose every glance seems to ask, “Why am I in this town?” and furthermore “why am I in this movie?” The film’s other authority figure is Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton), a meek but affable math teacher who tries to run a Boy Scouts-like camp with military precision.
The plot kicks into motion when Sam, an ostracized camper (Jared Gilman), fashions an escape from his tent, having planned a surreptitious rendezvous with Suzy (Kara Hayward), his pen-pal-turned-girlfriend. Suzy lives with her three siblings and lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), who are the kind of people Thoreau wrote about in his whole “lives of quiet desperation” line (in a clever nod to movies from the ’60s, the married couple sleeps in separate beds).
From here on, it’s a wild goose chase, with the two young lovers continually escaping capture by the scoutmaster, police captain, parents and even the other scouts, like two Wile E. Coyotes pursued by a group of disorganized Road Runners.
Moonrise Kingdom is both an homage to and parody of adolescent adventure stories, but Anderson films it with the stylistic inventiveness of the French New Wave; in short, he successfully channels the spirits of Francois Truffaut as much as Maurice Sendak. This is children’s movie for intelligent young adults, the kind who can appreciate the stylistic quirks that make Anderson an auteur par excellence.
Moonrise Kingdom is clearly an Anderson movie from the very first shot, of a needlepoint rendering of a perfect house, hanging on a wall in Suzy’s own deceptively perfect house. Anderson then dazzles us with one impressive tracking shot after another, moving through all of the rooms of his dollhouse of a set, mirroring a similar survey of the submarine in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. The broken/dysfunctional family hangup is present here too; Sam is an orphan whose foster family no longer wants anything to do with him, and Suzy is known for violent outbursts that have troubled her weary parents.
Anderson’s dialogue can remain a problem at times. If you’ve bothered by the stilted precocity of his language in the past, you’ll find more than enough material to irk you this time around. But appreciate this: Even in what must be considered his most accessible film to date, Anderson has delivered a movie ripe for auteurist picking, brimming with material for the cinephile and the average moviegoer to ponder.
I don’t know if Andrew Sarris got to see this film before he died; if not, his spirit is enjoying it somewhere.
MOONRISE KINGDOM. Director: Wes Anderson; Cast: Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bill Murray, Frances McDorman, Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel; Distributor: Focus Features; Rating: PG-13. Now playing at Cinemark Palace 20 in Boca Raton, Regal Delray 18 and the Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale.