It's about love, the innocence of the 60s, beautiful Maine, and a lot of amazing set design. WOW!

Rating: 9/10 (18 July 2012)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
It's hard to see anyone not liking this movie on one level or another. It's really really well made, top to bottom. The art direction almost takes front row in this one, in coordination with the photography, creating a plasticky, beautiful, fluid, and highly stylized view of mid-1960s summer camp on an island in Maine. It's breathtaking and flawless on that visual, physical level. It even breaks rules with impunity--rain bashing the windshield and then it's sunny and bright, or waters savaging the town and people surviving by hanging like paper dolls from a church eave.
Okay, you should know by now that this is a fable, a fairy tale set in rustic beautiful coastal America. The stars are children even if the famous actors are adults. (You want a list, you haven't yet heard that the cast includes Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Francis McDormand, and Bruce Willis. Yes!)
The first analogy that came to mind was "Night of the Hunter" for all the slightly and playfully surreal elements in a serious story of children striking out on their own. This one, in color, is less brooding, for sure. In fact, one of things to love is the bright humor all through. It's either hilarious or witty or clever every single second. When it's touching, or even deeply moving, it remains airy and perfect, too.
The references, subtle and obvious (from Tang to Boy Scout patches to nods to the movies and their romantic distillations), are part of the content. You know you are watching through a filter. Unlike, say, "The Artist," which sort of re-creates the past and makes it clean and bright and shiny, this invents a new kind of reality that seems to be a perfect example of the past. It doesn't just mime it. It becomes it, fresh. Though utterly false, too, on purpose. Like a memory polished in a mirror.
Of the adult actors there isn't much to say. They play their exaggerated parts with restraint (a great trick) and the over-the-top plot keeps finding little things to keep it in check. The movie never quite gets carried away (though the end with the storm does push the limits, switching to an almost-not-quite black and white for awhile, beautifully). The movie does carry the viewer away, however.
I saw this with my girlfriend who isn't from the U.S. and she liked the film but didn't love it. It might partly be sense of humor or taste, but I think it's partly how imbedded the nostalgia for the real 1960s is for many of us who grew up then, in the U.S. Everything was, as in the "Truman Show," a kind of nod to a seemingly ideal, safe, happy, ridiculously simple and moral time. Even the immorality here is limited to a touching of hands, as seen through some binoculars.
The one thread that I somehow predict will become a problem for born-agains and do-gooders (no offense, to either, I think) is that there is an implicit sanctioning of teenage touching, pre-sex, and running away. I know, it's a fairy tale, but when the main boy is smoking a pipe, he isn't just miming his dad, he's smoking a pipe. When the girl says the boy can touch him where he shouldn't, he does. It's amazingly innocent, but it does imply a freedom unthinkable in the movies of the 1960s, if not in real life.
By the way, this is set before the hippy 60s. There is no hint of drugs or even rock and roll. The adults as much as the kids are pure as snow. Just a bit restless and wanting more than what they have. Which is maybe the story of all of us, one point or another.
See this. See this. See this.