Is this man a genius?

Rating: 8/10 (26 July 2012)

You don't so much enter this charming film, as hover endlessly in front of it. Like so many of his painstakingly planned tracking shots, I felt that I had drifted across the face of something amazing, though never quite touched down, except perhaps in those so-deliberate punchline moments that Anderson punctuates his scripts with, like clock chimes, ringing out the awkward progress of his films.
This, however, felt like the point. Anderson was deliberately straddling some essential cinematic paradox. His exquisite, tyrannic control of the scenery, the clothing, the actors and the script - which thrusts Moonrise Kingdom into an almost panel comic world - can never fully distract attention from the fact of itself, from its nature as utterly, consciously, unapologetically staged. Yet, I ended up feeling that, despite itself, it was an incredible film. Even more amazing, it managed to convey a love story between two prepubescent teenagers with little or no sentimentality, and zero prurience.
At moments it felt as though we have inherited a comic Fellini, as happy to pepper his own work with references to Sin City as The Satyricon. Anderson himself must have dealt with the compromises such a style forces on the director - that to serve up this brand of farce largely excludes any serious connection with the characters themselves. Yet you DO feel something for his characters, even though you suspect, perhaps, Anderson doesn't want you to. It's not a conventional sympathy, more a faint sense of superiority, for being in on the joke that they themselves can never get.
I ended up wondering exactly what it IS Anderson wants me to feel about these two children, their escape from one non-threatening situation into another. When the red-jacketed narrator appears, and the cross cuts that see him switch location after location while never breaking his stream of explanation, why does he offset each cut, rather than matching them up seamlessly, as he so easily could have? Why does Wes Anderson never let me forget that I'm watching a movie?
In the end, I found myself suspecting that this man, who is unquestionably a visionary maker of some fantastic - if divisive - films, is compensating for something. I began to wonder if, maybe, his devotion to set-piece cinema was the act of someone making films the only way he possibly could - with a fanatic, nearly autistic attention to every conceivable detail. At moments, the results skirt the sublime. They honestly do. And it is no disrespect to say that he is not a natural, not that sort of director who can point a camera at anything and make it beautiful, or fascinating. Moonrise Kingdom is a masterpiece, but ultimately, the camera is almost an afterthought, bought in after everything else has been done. But who else is going to have a 3-minute track through an active 1963 Scout Camp? or watch, from a distance, as those dozens of scouts chase one of their own in a giant yellow corkscrew across a wet park at night?
When it looks so beautiful, feels so very nearly poetic, and is - in fact - this funny, does it matter why?