A movie well suited for the world

Rating: 3/10 (19 July 2012)

I read a short story recently by Ernest Hemingway that I didn't want to like as I was reading it, even though technically speaking the story was good. I read another short story recently by Edgar Allen Poe that I wanted to like as I was reading it, even though the story was a failure. And the reason I was routing against the one, and for the other, had mostly to do with the attitude of the artist. And while Moonrise Kingdom has some significant things going for it (good scout location, strong visual cohesiveness), why did I want so badly to dislike the movie from start to finish? Well, because of the attitude behind the movie, which was pretentious. And since the world we live in is covered over with pretense it makes all the sense in the world that a filmmaker with such sensibilities would be backed to spend millions making something like this.
Henry James wrote about Drama that the key is not to make something clever, or smart, or surprising, or shocking; the key in drama, he said, is to make it interesting. And to make it interesting it must be intense, while remaining emotionally honest.
While the visuals in this movie were very impressive, and the locations beautiful, why did I feel so bored from start to finish? For better or worse, the soul of drama, as Aristotle put it, is plot. And the plot of this movie lacked interest to the extent that it lacked soul. A great irony of the picture is that one can tell very much that the the filmmarks prize their sense of intellect, good taste and cleverness. So how bewildering it was then that many lines felt like they were written by Beavis and Butthead posing as high brows.