If you haven't seen Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom yet, and have no plans to do so, you're probably not a very good person. Watching this movie was like looking at an old 110 photograph picture cube. If you remember the acrylic photo cubes containing muted pictures of women with big hair in pastel mini dresses or boys in scouting gear or men with crew cuts and short sleeve dress shirts, then the first five minutes of Anderson's latest, best film will move you to tears.
The film is quirky (not that I would expect less from the thinking man's Tim Burton) but unrelentingly beautiful and perfectly nostalgic. Not nostalgic in a smarmy way that idealizes the past, but nostalgic for the look and feel of a time when we were young, when love was the fiercest and a kiss was everything. The film works as a visual reenactment of e.e. Cummings "Anyone lived in a pretty how town", with Sam and Suzy, the film's love struck pre-teens, as Anyone and No one. And like Cummings poetry and world, Anderson's is one where the magic and the beauty are all too human. There are no aliens here, no ghosts, no chocolate factories, only deeply flawed people in a nearly real world.
It's my 45th birthday as I write this and I can't help feeling a bit old, out of sorts. That I can still go to a movie and leave with tears in my eyes is testament to the power of the medium. That movies like Moonrise are still being made and that people go to see them suggests that we are not as doomed as the local news suggests. There have been people who have criticized the mild sexuality between the two young actors, and others who feel that the affair between Mrs. Bishop and Capt. Sharp should have been resolved. The truth is that kids on the cusp of adulthood do explore sex and people do have affairs and, to the film's credit, it doesn't really matter. The sex wasn't the story; it never really is. I would live, have lived, in Moonrise Kingdom for 45 years and it's nice to see that other people know how to get there. Thanks for making me feel 12 for a night Mr. Anderson.
I hadn't really planned on seeing it, but now I think I will. But then again, I might not since that would make "not a very good person." I hate being told what to do.
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