Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

I love Moonrise Kingdom. There, I said it. End of review.

OK, that’s not really the end. Pardon my rapturous take, but writer-director Wes Anderson appears to be one of very few filmmakers who can truly capture the strange world of adolescent love — its exuberance, its earnestness and its flat-out weirdness.

Anderson’s best works, particularly Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, have tickled such repeating themes as the quest for family and the melancholia of lost youth. Those ideas reach their most poignant realization in Moonrise Kingdom, and it does so with such a nimble touch as to be almost magical. It is funny but not absurd (this is before Anderson began dispensing with plot altogether), quirky but not suffocatingly so.

Set in 1965, our star-crossed lovers are Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), 12-year-olds who meet one summer on the mythical New England island of New Penzance, where Suzy lives and Sam is attending a scouting camp. 

The two are destined for each other. Sam, outfitted in crooked eyeglasses and coonskin cap, is an orphan who has trouble making friends. Suzy, burdened with three younger brothers and whose parents (Bill Murray  and Frances McDormand) are having marital problems, has trouble curbing a volatile temper. After a flurry of no-nonsense correspondence, Sam and Suzy plan to run away from their respective adult supervision and rendezvous for a momentous adventure before summer’s end.

She brings a suitcase filled with girls’ adventure books and a battery-operated record player. Sam takes camping gear and a corncob pipe. Together they dance on a secluded beach, read dime-store novels and explore a romance as chaste as it is irresistible. Meanwhile, they must dodge Sam’s befuddled scout master (Edward Norton), a troop of heavily armed scouts, and New Penzance’s sole police officer, the chronically dour-looking Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis). 

If you have been deprived of having seen Moonrise Kingdom up to now, the less revealed about what happens, the better. The script by Anderson and Roman Coppola (Francis‘ son) doesn’t rely on twists, exactly, but its unpredictability is one of the many joys here. Few movies can keep you guessing as to where it’s headed, but Moonrise Kingdom is too wonderfully unique to anticipate. For all its hilarity, you sense the possibility of real danger.

Anderson’s film is crafted with the same precision and visual sumptuousness his admirers have come to expect, from painterly compositions to elaborate camera tracking shots that take us through this imaginative world. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman injects a swirl of Kodachrome colors to augment a feeling of nostalgia for childhoods that never existed. And the cast is uniformly excellent, including a brief but memorable turns by Anderson regulars Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman. This is one for the ages.