A Film Canon

Moonrise Kingdom differs in several significant respects from Wes Anderson's previous films. Firstly, it's his only film to date to explicitly take place in the 1960s. Secondly, it inverts his trademark preciousness into something more like precociousness, centering on children who behave like adults, rather than adults who behave like children. Thirdly, it's predominantly filmed outside, as Anderson follows a pair of twelve-year old lovers, Sam and Suzy, who retreat to the heart of a New England island, only to be pursued by their parents and other residents. If Anderson's approach to his immaculately constructed dollhouse interiors is as mathematical and measured as always, his outdoor sequences - many of which feel hand-held, at least comparatively - approach something closer to surveying, or, rather, the pragmatic approach to landscape upheld by the scouting community at the film's core. It's no exaggeration to say that this part of the film attempts to blend film-making and map-making as much as possible, drawing on the graphology of Anderson's earlier pictures to present a narrator who doubles as a cartographer, and a vision of New England with an emphasis on the England; a landscape that's completely knowable and manageable, given the right skills and acquirements, or a fragment of Britain that only varies in the same, formalist way as Britten's Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra, which opens the narrative and cements its formal experiments. What makes the film so strong is Anderson's fusion of this cartography with the rituals of the couple, which come closer than anything else in his oeuvre to the ritualistic expectations of his audience itself, or the flowered rituals that his films serve. Given that his peculiarly mobile camera and dramatic use of ninety-degree whip pans has the effect of extending his film beyond it's usual two-dimensional mode - it's Anderson's version of 3D cinema - this ultimately has the effect of spinning the audience round the corner that separates them from their own fantasy, as well as suggesting that Anderson's project isn't nostalgia for the 60s so much as continuing a 60s mythology of itself that was as fictional and fantastic then as it is now. If there's any weakness, it's the third act's reversion to the precious, adult, interior world - compared to the children, the adults are positively soporific, the degree zero of Anderson's deadpan style, and generally work best as tent poles, or trigonometric co-ordinates, ossifying reminders of just how narrowly Anderson has rescued his world from growing up.