Thanks, I Hate It: Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson has always reminded me of a morlock. He's this pallid, kind of anemic figure hunched beneath a placid little fairytale world and laboring to keep it turning for the amusement of an ignorant public. In lieu of snatching one of us from time to eat and eating us alive down there in the gloomy labyrinth of his domain, though, he just sucks all the joy and emotion out of everything he touches. Sort of like the glowy thing in that Star Trek episode that eats bad feelings and hates laughter. The things he makes feel, in some fundamental way, dead. 

But of all Anderson's bloodless movies, none gets under my skin quite like Moonrise Kingdom, the story of two wearisomely quirky tweens who run away from home in a spasm of young love and general misfittery. First there's the weird schoolgirl archetype into which Anderson molds young actress Kara Hayward. Mascara, eye shadow, knee-high stockings and a variety of primly starched little uniforms that wouldn't look out of place on Jacqueline Onassis--it's a weird way to dress a child, and it's clean, crisp execution puts the lie to any pretense that it's about her haste to leave childhood behind. That the film includes a quiet moment of sexual exploration between its young protagonists does not jive well with this weird, repressed adultification.

Like all of Anderson's movies Moonrise Kingdom has a single consistent volume applied to all dialogue from its beginning to its end. Everyone says everything slowly and without affect, like they're recording options for an automated telephone menu. Anderson is often referred to as a "dollhouse" director, both by his detractors and his admirers, and his penchant for neatness certainly extends to his characters. Their line readings, their costuming, their body language; it's all carefully modulated and restrained not in service to communicating some great suppressed emotion but to assure that nothing interferes with the director's tidy little puppet show.

Is there some merit in Anderson's symmetrical shots of brightly-colored things? Sure. That he uses color at all is a mark in his favor. Is it enough to sustain an entire film? Not by a long shot, and certainly not a film that builds itself around relationships while expressing next to no interest in them. The end result feels as though it's about nothing in particular at all. Moonrise Kingdom is a child's afternoon of make-believe with all the charm and earnestness of childhood sanded away to make room for a fussy adult sensibility which prizes pastel pillbox hats over human emotion.