Our daughter's been abducted by one of these beige lunatics

Rating: Null/10 (4 July 2013)

"Under postmodernism, hysteria and schizophrenia become modes of cultural production as well as cultural pathologies." - Louise Mousseau
From the Willy Wonka toolbox of Wes Anderson comes "Moonrise Kingdom", a cute adventure set on a mythical New England island.
The film's elaborate opening sequences introduce us to Anderson's players. Using Benjamin Britten's "A Young Person's Orchestral Guide" to assign different musical passages to each of his characters, Anderson informs us that his cast can't healthily function without one another. He then proceeds to split them up. They're alienated, see. At this point we meet the nerdy Suzy (Kara Hawward), who loves adventure novels and French singer Francois Hardy, and Sam (Jared Gilman), an orphan who's been bouncing from one foster home to the next. They're your classic Anderson archetypes, intelligent, geeky and depressed. They're also in love, and so set about escaping to a remote island in order to pledge their undying love.
Bizarrely, Suzy is modelled on seductive French heroines, whilst the nerdy Sam is portrayed as a super efficient boyscout, adorned with badges, ribbons and broaches. Their naive romance and idealised woodland existence is then mirrored to the film's adult characters (Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand), all of whom live lives of quiet desperation. Using various symbolic moments, Anderson hints that Suzy and Sam are destined for precisely the adult world which they hope to escape; disappointment awaits.
The majority of Anderson's films are about mid-life crises, castration anxieties, depressed kids, emasculated man-children, kids with serious daddy issues, self doubting child-men and tweed wearing posh people who fantasise about being macho enough to wrestle big fish. "Moonrise Kingdom" continues this trend. Strong, stable parental figure are absent, everyone's alienated, characters use megaphones and binoculars to bridge the vast chasms between them, and Anderson's kids seem perpetually lost. Actor Edward Norton, who plays a comical scout leader, offers some direction, but Suzy and Sam want out. When they disappear into the wilderness, Norton launches a massive man-hunt which escalates into a miniature guerrilla war reminiscent of "Badlands" and "First Blood". Only cuter.
More than most Anderson flicks, "Kingdom" resembles a well assembled doll-house. Anderson relies heavily on cutaway tracking shots, quirky colours, frames scenes like a meticulous cabinet maker and dresses his cast like stuffed dolls. This is cinema as a kind of postmodern pop-up book. Every shot is supremely precious, Anderson's tone is extremely mannered, and every artifact is self-consciously and proudly displayed, from aluminium ashtrays to leather bound books, to battery operated record players to Suzy's knee socks and saddle shoes. These are all relics from a vanished childhood which existed only in the books and films of Anderson's youth. Such a style grates at first, but eventually its charms win you over.
Director's like Tarantino are often attacked for plagiarism, but Anderson's no different, though he gorges on more up-market fare. In this regard, Suzy and Sam's plot is a literal rip off of Godard's "Pierrot Le Fou", Suzy is made up to look like Anna Karina in Godard's film (red dress and blue eyeshadow), character's sling objects over their shoulders (rifles etc) like those in "Pierrot Le Fou", Godard's famous scissor stabbing is replicated and Godard's beach sequences reappear here as a sequence at a small bay.
But Anderson's filmography has always been packed with "homages". He oft quotes "The Graduate", "Harold and Maude" (particularly Jason Schwartzman's relationship in "Rushmore"), "Paper Moon", "Brewster McCloud", "The World of Henry Orient", Jacques Tati, Andy Warhol, Louis Male's "Le Feu Follet", Richard Lester's hip Beatles movies ("A Hard Day's Night", "Help!"), Godard's "Band of Outsiders" and his tracking musical climaxes echo the conclusion of "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice". Anderson also acknowledges Renoir's "The River" as a major influence on "The Darjeeling Limited", as well as the films of Satyajit Ray. Anderson also has a major Charles Schulz fetish. His films replicate the wistful melancholy of Schulz's "Peanut" cartoons and are always seriocomedies with a visual style reminiscent of "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (he even squeezes "Christmas Time is Here" into the "Royal Tenenbaum's" soundtrack).
And more than most postmodernists, Anderson's infatuated with postwar, modernist, European directors. His films are love-letters to Truffaut, feature a distinctly hip mid-60s aesthetic, utilise the blunt title cards of Godard, and regularly regurgitate totems of the Nouvelle Vague. Elsewhere "The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie" gives birth to scenes in "The Life Aquatic", a film which Anderson himself says was hugely influenced by Fellini's "8 1/2". The books of J.D. Salinger are also an influence, as is Orson Welles "The Magnificent Ambersons", one of the godfathers of "The Royal Tenenbaums".
Of course pastiche, incessant referencing, semantic instability and an escape from reality into a kind of meta-textual hell, are the chief vices of postmodern art. Postmodernism is itself defined by a loss of a transcendent values and a lapse in morality, direction, meaning and hope. You might say the anomie and despair of Anderson's characters, who are often lost amidst referents without a reference point of their own, is caused by the very aesthetic of his art, the socio-historical causes of which his films ignore.
8/10 – Cuter than a basket of bunnies.