Youth is Not Wasted on the Young. It's Abused by Adults

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2012)

The two lead kids are a curious, quirky revamping of Shakespeare's star-crossed adolescent lovers from Verona, but the inexorable obstacle thwarting Sam and Suzy's eternal union is not their feuding clans but the increasingly bizarre, malfunctioning society into which they've been born. The 60s in America were a time of drastic, profound social changes and 1965 was a year immediately on the threshold of some of the most drastic, most disorienting upheavals to the status quo. A generation of educated, financially advantaged, and chemically motivated young people were beginning to reject the many negative, outdated beliefs that afflicted the unsteady, faltering nation, and they did this by adopting radical new attitudes, fashions, and philosophies. They molded these into their personal arsenals of weapons of defiance, and would deploy them against the powers that be. Parents often were the most convenient and most deserving targets of the generational revolution, and this certainly is the case for the two precocious 'tweens here. Suzy's parents' disintegrating marriage is a potent catalyst in moving her to take moderately drastic action and escape to the far side of the mythically quaint New England island, New Penzance, along with the stoic, strange, but charming Sam, whose parents are guilty of the even more heinous and inexcusable injustice of having died and left him an unwanted orphan.
Throughout the film there are plenty of subtle - very subtle - hints at the many classic stories from recent and distant history that deal with childhood traumas, triumphs, and treacheries, such as Lord of the Flies, Oliver Twist, The Tempest, Hamlet, The Hardy Boys, Old Yeller, Barn Burning, and many others. None of these sources is bluntly, crassly, overtly referenced or quoted. Rather, these many appropriate influences are only faintly detectable through the unquestionably clear, but curiously distorting prism of Wes Anderson's now exceptionally well developed cinematic method. Interestingly, all the well known literary antecedents from which Wes draws upon have been inverted - flipped on their heads - so that it's only by a very definite spinning around and turning inside out of the increasingly outlandish situations that we might guess and appreciate from whence it all comes. That's a hard feat to pull off even just once or twice in a movie, but Moonrise Kingdom is a jam packed solid 94 minute parade of exactly this trick. For example, in The Tempest Miranda is alone and isolated on a nearly deserted isle with her father and - like any creature inexperienced in the crass ways of the wider world - she naively assumes that all new visitors to her island posses hearts of gold. But Suzy, in the incessant company of only her younger three brothers, is shockingly sexually aware and sophisticated, or at least appears to be if you chose to judge her by her mod mini skirts and her lavish eye makeup and her brutally honest and sharp tongue. Another example of how the film cleverly compliments it's literary sources is the tightly militaristic coordination of Wes' khaki clad kids, which plays so nicely against our memories of the increasing ragged and savage shipwrecked gang in Lord of the Flies. The subtle contrast is made doubly resonant when, unlike the inhuman treatment dealt out to the incompetent misfit Piggy, Wes' clean cut, spotlessly uniformed scout troop - in spite of their well meaning but bumbling chain smoking troop leader played exquisitely by Ed Norton - independently conspires to heroically rescue the self ostracized Sam from the clutches of the nefarious adults in a brilliantly choreographed Seal Team 6 style maneuver. The deft allusions to literary teen dramas are here only to help us grasp just how upside down their world around them has gotten, and by implication, our world around us today. And then there's the spectacularly understated beach camp scenario with Sam and Suzy that develops into a preposterous spoof of that most ridiculous of all teen love fantasies, The Blue Lagoon. I bet almost nobody who has seen this film gets the joke, but I did and it's a touch of genius in an already superbly intelligent and genuinely funny film.
Wes has made it look deceptively simple and natural, and therefor many viewers will likely miss the full brilliance of his masterful achievement. That's not to say that those possibly oblivious viewers won't enjoy his surprisingly nuanced and deeply satisfying fable; they just won't admire and cherish it and be raving about it as emphatically as I am. It's so confidently, and efficiently, and stylishly executed that all the sly nods to its cultural heritage finally are icing on a sincerely delicious and satiating cake. I kept catching myself thinking "I need to see this scene again," and "I really wanna see that scene again!" Well, I just gotta have me another big fat slice of the whole damn movie.