Being an outsider can sometimes be a difficult thing to deal with in life. You might not have that many friends, you might feel alone and there’s a chance you’ll miss the normal forms of human contact. One of the positives about being an outcast is that you don’t always have to feel alone and isolated. Eventually, you’ll find some people who can respect, understand and appreciate you for who you are. That’s the case for the two pre-teen outcasts in Moonrise Kingdom. They meet, fall in love and develop a strong bond for one another.
Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) are two isolated twelve-year-olds who find solace in each other and fall in love over their common bond. While residing on a small island just off of the New England coast, the two kids decide to run away from their problems and be together. Once everyone from parents to social workers to Khaki Scout troop leaders finds out what’s going on, they all get involved to catch the runaways and put a stop to whatever plans they have. That’s much easier said than done, because these determined lovebirds will do whatever they can to live out their dreams with one another.
Moonrise Kingdom begins well with its opening scene that gives us a quick look at what’s going on in the household of Suzy Bishop and her family. As we continue to go around and get a broader look at all that’s happening on this Island back in 1965. During this time, we see some good-looking scenery and we’re introduced to some weird-looking characters to go along with a slightly odd story about kids being in love. It didn’t take long for me to realize that these things would be the most important part of the movie. Based on the way this is presented, you know that the rest of the movie will most likely be on the quirky side of things.
From a purely visual perspective, the characters and the environment that surrounds them are there to tell the story. We see that through things like their facial expressions, some of their hairstyles, the various choices of weaponry at their disposal and through the many beautiful shots of nature. That’s fine to a certain extent, but the characters in this film are a little too bland for my liking. While they do have personality from a visual standpoint, they lack actual personality from an emotional standpoint.
Almost all of these characters in Moonrise Kingdom are stiff and emotionless and that doesn’t work for me at all. They don’t act like people who you would normally meet in everyday life in any way, shape or form. That’s especially true for the kids, who act too old for their ages and don’t seem to be invested in living life like a child normally does. I personally prefer movies where the people have more emotion and personality. The lack of personality here hampered my ability to like this as much as I possibly could have under normal circumstances.
I felt nothing for these characters and Wes Anderson’s style didn’t really give me enough room to. Usually when I have a movie in front of me about kids being outcasts and trying to find out about who they are and what they want, I can root for them during the search for their happy ending. In Moonrise Kingdom however, I just wasn’t able to do that. How can I root for kids with no personality? To me it comes off as if Sam and Suzy don’t truly care about anything that they are doing and they are a couple of border line sociopathic kids just repeating what they’ve seen adults do. They, like most of the cast of characters, have no personality to speak of.
The two best characters don’t come from any of the actors with primary roles. Those two characters are played by Tilda Swinton and Bob Balaban. Swinton is the social worker and has one of the few characters that appears to resemble an actual human being to some degree. Along with maybe a couple of others, she wore some emotion on her sleeve so to speak. Nearly everyone else wore it subtlety on their faces, but that’s about it. It’s a shame that she wasn’t given more time on camera, because she’s more watchable than anyone else in Moonrise Kingdom.
Balaban has the second best character as the narrator and he’s a bright spot early on. His problems come as time progresses and he quickly fades and becomes more and more obscure and less and less insightful and entertaining. That’s because his scenes don’t change much and his Stepford wives like tendencies start showing just as much as everyone else’s the longer he stays in front of the camera.
Moonrise Kingdom feels like it was created by an intelligent kid who isn’t mature enough to construct a movie about people with legitimate complexities that includes some adult subject matter. I don’t think that any movie should ever solely rely on its looks and a potentially decent story to carry it. That’s essentially what happens here with the characters lacking any real depth and human like qualities for the most part. I’ve seen just about every one of these established actors put on some solid to great performances in their careers and I don’t understand why they weren’t allowed to have more life than what they show.
It appears that Anderson wanted the emotion and temperament of Moonrise Kingdom to show itself through the visual aspects of the movie only. In my opinion, he focused so much on the superficial artwork of the film that he left the characters completely empty and devoid of anything worth mentioning. While the cinematography and music in this movie are both positives for me, having barren characters took away most of the enjoyment that I thought there could have been in the film. Moonrise Kingdom is kind of like a beautiful woman trying to attract men solely on her looks. It may work for a while, but for some of us dudes, you’re going to have to have some positive inner qualities to complement your outer beauty. It’s never good for anyone to be a beautiful idiot.
