Let's go camping in Moonrise Kingdom

When I was younger I was in the Boy Scouts. I didn’t much care for it at the time, but I look back on those years fondly.

The camping memories are especially vivid: the boy who played Dungeons & Dragons in his tent because his parents forbid it in their home. The boys who would take fallen branches and broken sticks and pretend they were guns and bazookas; pinecones were grenades. The one boy who always had a cast somewhere on his body. The kid who wasn’t happy unless he was burning something with a lighter (once he tried to light a Porta-John on fire). The kid who plucked soggy Vienna sausages from a can and stuck them up his nose. The boy who tried to light his farts at every campfire. The one boy who would never shower (think Pig-Pen from Peanuts). The one kid who dropped his flashlight in the portable toilet, which meant we all had to look at vaguely luminescent feces in the bathroom until the batteries died several days later. Or the one boy who would arrive at week-long snow outings without a jacket or even spare socks.

We did scouting things, like merit badges and knots and wilderness survival, but those memories are crowded out by the others, the ones of the people and their wild personalities.

I thought about those scouts a lot during Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s adorable new love story set within a troop of mischievous Khaki Scouts on a 16-mile-wide island in Rhode Island. The movie is a love poem to rambunctious boys and their medieval ideas about life, adventure and girls. It stars two young actors who convey the awkward innocence of adolescence because, well, just look at them, they’re perfect.

First there’s Sam (Jared Gilman), the unpopular Khaki Scout with the coonskin hat who hatches an escape plan as thorough as the one in The Shawshank Redemption, though we never see it, just the poster covering the torn hole in his pup tent. Before he leaves, he drafts a letter of resignation to Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), a kind and compassionate scout leader with a laughable smoking habit. With his backpack stocked with rope, navigation equipment and enough Tang and beef jerky to last a week, Sam cuts a trail across New Penzance Island to discover himself.

He eventually meets up with Suzy (Kara Hayward), who receives little attention in her home so she decides to run away with Sam, maybe to a hidden cove where there will live off the land and fall in love. Suzy is more complex to Sam’s textbook simplicity. They make a darling couple, though some of the things they do and encounter require maturity beyond their years and they perform admirably. Once these two go missing, the small island is turned upside down by pocketknife-toting Khaki Scouts, their overwhelmed leader, a mail plane, two marginally worried parents (Billy Murray and Frances McDormand) and a befuddled police officer (Bruce Willis). Every now and again, Bob Balaban turns up in his sailing gear to narrate parts of the adventure.

Now, I’ve just told you the plot, but I’ve expressed less than a tenth of what Moonrise Kingdom actually is. Keep in mind, this is a Wes Anderson picture, which means the movie is filled with whimsy, quirkiness and all his other signature moves: deadpan acting, a retro lo-fi soundtrack, wonderfully detailed sets, unique cinematography techniques (unconventional framing, symmetrical composition), Bill Murray’s feigned machoness, and a timeless, albeit analog, fashion sense. New to the Anderson collection this time around is an authentic love story. Love was an expression in his other films, including Rushmore and Bottle Rocket, but this might be Anderson’s first full-fledged romance.

I was startled to see where Sam and Suzy’s relationship went, especially since they appeared to be no older than about 12 years old. Surely, sex is too mature a theme for that age, but the movie handles it with care and I think the PG-13 rating is proof to that. Any other movie would hint that this adolescent love couldn’t last, that Suzy and Sam would grow up and drift apart and then rediscover love with other people in high school or their 20s. I think not. I can picture these two growing old together. It’s a fantasy relationship, but remember this is a fantasy world.

The two leads have their romance, but then there’s another — our love affair with that damn island. It’s just so delightfully odd, with its patches of scruffy beauty pock-marked by colorful locals and those wild Khaki Scouts and their 60-foot treehouse and their impenetrable scout camp. Anderson has a way of coloring his locations with so much character that they develop into personalities themselves. Think of that school in Rushmore, the Tenenbaum manor, the Indian train in The Darjeeling Limited, or, my favorite, the research vessel Belafonte in A Life Aquatic. Like those settings, New Penzance Island is special because it’s magical, yet feels real enough to inhabit these characters. If you leave the movie and don’t have the urge to vacation to that island then Moonrise has failed you.

The movie is also hilarious, but in subtle swaths of visual and ironic humor. I especially loved the dialogue, which is so underplayed it almost feels off the beat. There’s nothing funnier than Bill Murray’s character, unhappy with the days events, coming downstairs shirtless in his pajama bottoms carrying a bottle of whiskey and an ax and telling his remaining children, “I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down.” Even the children are given funny lines, like when someone asks whether a dead dog was a good pet or not. Sam says, “Who’s to say?” What child speaks in abstract philosophical nonsense? Anderson’s children, that’s who.

Elements of fantasy creep into the picture more and more as it goes along, and at one point someone is struck by lightning with no discernible injuries. There’s also a flood that sweeps away a scout camp, a totem pole that nearly crushes a celebrity cameo, a Noah’s Ark of costumed children and a storm of the century. Anderson shows us these events using subtle special effects, miniatures, trick lighting techniques, forced perspective and almost always at right angles perpendicular to the action. The film is like nothing you’ve ever seen … unless you’ve seen a Wes Anderson movie before.

I loved Moonrise Kingdom, and not just because of the scouting material. I loved it because it made me appreciate my childhood so much more. Those awkward phases defined who we are today, more so than high school, or college, or a career. Those moments when we were discovering ourselves, those were the key moments of our development. Moonrise captures that and does so with careful affection.

I'm including all the pictures after the jump, but one note: they had a yellow tint to them that I don't remember in the movie. Using Photoshop I've balanced the colors a little better. It's not my intention to change Anderson's movie; I just felt like they didn't match what I'd seen on the screen.