Moonrise Kingdom – Absurdity and Hope, at River Oaks Theater
On a 1960s New England Island, precocious teen girl Suzy and outcast orphan boy scout Sam fall in love and run away into the wilderness, building their “Moonrise kingdom”. “Moonrise” is, of course, in opposition to sunrise, what the mainstream world views as hope and new beginnings. The teenagers, who find themselves irreconcilably different, decide to be different triumphantly. The storytelling is unambiguous. The colors are big, the characters are caricatured – some don’t have a name – Tilda Swinton is “Child Protection Services”. As I walked into River Oaks Theater, I realized that the auditorium was not a cinema but a traditional theater space, with soft grey seats, red velvet curtains, and a stage. The set-up was a great arrangement to study teenage rebellion, as somewhat of a play and at other points farcical, a kind of exaggerated artifice.
A man wearing glasses walked upstage and introduced himself as Rob Saucedo, the artistic director of River Oaks. “How many of you have seen this movie before?” Many hands shot up. “How many of you have never seen this?” Many hands shot up. He went on to talk about Wes Anderson, Houston-born, how the Fantastic Mr. Fox was a box office disappointment that shrank the budget for Moonrise Kingdom to a minimum, making what we were about to see extra remarkable. Resting against my soft grey sofa chair, I felt comfortably unsusceptible to any glamorization of Wes Anderson because of how tokenized his style is in many consumerisms. However, I reserve a soft spot for the nostalgic, sun-lit, warm-toned grotesqueness of his wide shots.
When Suzy holds up binoculars and watches for Sam, watches her mother cheating, or peers into the distance. The binoculars, a symbol of Suzy’s coldly detached view of the world, mirror Sam’s glasses which makes him stick out in the Boy Scouts like a sore thumb. In this way they are connected. Being perceived, and perceiving, in some warped way, is a central thematic concern.
Perception creates difficulty. Absurdities of the movie reveal themselves unrelentingly. When Sam goes missing, the Boy Scouts (actual children) are dispatched to look for him, in the depths of the forest, as if they are the police force. The lead boy scout tries to gain permission to “use violence” on Sam if they find him. They do get violent: Snoopy, an innocent dog, the soberest character among the scouts, gets killed. People are put in roles they are grossly unprepared for. Some pretend like it’s their life mission: the Scout leader prides himself on his authority(he’s just a math teacher) and, when berated by an older Scout, whimpers like one of the boys he bosses around.
Other people know they’re grossly unfit, but don’t care to pretend: Sam’s foster parents “refuse to permit” Sam to return home because he is a teenage boy who got into trouble (they do that!!). Special Services wants to put Sam into juvenile detention even though it was Suzy who stabbed a person, because it’s the easiest way to deal with an orphan. The ludicrousness coheres through layers and layers of repetition of the same illogical arrangement, like paint peeling on a canvas, eventually revealing a soft white absence. In the shots, characters crowd in the foreground, staring blankly at each other, while the background in the large depth of field becomes conspicuously empty of human presence. It makes you want to ask: Why are you standing there? What are you looking at me for? Why aren’t you doing something about it?
There is a lot of water throughout the movie: the river, the flood, the rain that never seems to stop – the first diegetic sound we hear is a clap of thunder. In the end, the characters are drenched – amidst the rainstorm, the police officer decides to adopt Sam. It feels like no one has a way to shield against the downpour. For one, no one has an umbrella. They only have the yellow tents, the ones owned by the Boy Scouts at the beginning of the movie, and the one Sam builds by the beach, symbolically founding the Moonrise Kingdom, where Suzy reads stories and Sam falls asleep. Sometimes, these are the only things to escape to in a relentless deluge. Maybe Anderson celebrates these small shelters, momentary sanctuaries.
It was clear that the audience took it this way – the atmosphere was lighthearted, as bursts of laughter threaded through the darkness at each juncture where the situation seemed unsalvageable. My friend and I laughed at fumbling parents. Older people laughed at the children. Many of us wined and dined. Shuffling out of the theater, everyone was smiling. I wondered how much of myself I could see in Suzy, and whether she would get angry at these people too, if she wasn’t so busy, that is, trying to escape from them. I found a little bit of solace, I suppose, in the fact that she was still wearing her signature grungy blue eyeshadow by the end. Sam stopped being a boy scout and started cosplaying Island Police. But Suzy was still reading her books and speaking in her nonchalant way. Her steadfast rebellion is Moonrise Kingdom.