Moonrise Kingdom is a celebration of young love in the naively innocent America of the mid-1960s. It is both charming and exquisitely filmed giving a sense of period and a picture postcard view of the islands where it is set. There are plenty of Wes Anderson's trademark panning shots - moving from one room to another - and clever use of texts and letters that show an awareness of the possibilities of cinema without having to resort to CGI effects or 3D to achieve visual interest and effects.
Moonrise Kingdom is set in New Penzance, a small New England coastal town, in 1965, in a little coastal town in New England called New Penzance. Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are two bright but unpopular kids who fall in love. Sam, an orphan, is a member of the Khaki Scouts. Suzy reads sci-fi and the music of Françoise Hardy on her brother's portable record player. She spies on people - her parents and their friends - using a pair of binoculars.
Sam and Suzy decide to run away together and the ensuing crisis highlights the problems in the lives of Suzy's lawyer parents (played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Ed Norton is the ridiculous leader of the scout troop, and Bruce Willis is the lonely police chief, but they all pull together in fear and of the social services officer (Tilda Swinton) who is overly keen keen to pack Sam away into an orphanage.
The movie is gently comic throughout, with touches of the absurd and the exaggerated. There are few outright belly laughs, but they wouldn't seem at home amongst the quirkiness and oddity of Anderson's cinematic style - full of small town America and simple lives torn apart by more modern events and sensitivities all of which seem awkward and alien to the world of New Penzance.
The soundtrack is a fascinating mix of, amongst other things, period songs by Hank Williams and a variety of pieces by Benjamin Britten (including his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Simple Symphony and Noye's Fludde - which becomes particularly significant towards the end of the movie).
I thoroughly enjoyed Moonrise Kingdom - it is simple storytelling at its best, with some fantastic performances from all involved (but notably the two young stars in their first movie). Sadly, as is so often the case with the slightly off-beat, it has had a limited release and will be forgotten amongst the Special FX of all the blockbusters being released this week and next.
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