#6) Moonrise Kingdom, by Wes Anderson (2012)

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time,” says Mircea Eliade, a 20^th century religious historian and philosopher. Think of profane time as a worn out world, a period in which chaos has corrupted the foundation of a given space. Rituals are meant to reenact primordial deeds performed by gods during creation, bringing about a sacred space and time; the world is rediscovered, beginning anew.

Moonrise Kingdom is more than a love adventure between two 12 year-old kids. Beneath what appears to be a surface of Anderson-verse silliness is a rich mythological subtext rooted in primordial ritualism that defines both the individual and the society. Beyond two kids in love, Moonrise is about a fractured community going through a rebirth. Bob Balaban’s Narrator wouldn’t go through all the trouble to tell us the details of New Penzance Island if the whole weren’t important.

But within the whole is much division, something Wes Anderson was conscious of as early as writing the screenplay, emphasizing split screens, zippers moving straight down the Y-axis, walls dividing characters, and staging that suggests dissonance. We open on the Bishop family perfectly exemplifying such division, a montage isolating each character to their own space. Only the youngest set of brothers, possibly triplets, show any unity; the first statement about the unifying force of youth. But the eldest daughter, Suzy (Kara Hayward), Mr. Bishop (Bill Murray), and Mrs. Bishop (Frances McDormand) all remain separate; the American dream has been fractured. The final shot in this sequence brings all the entities together, still separated in one long tracking shot back through four spaces along the Z-axis. Suzy is the only one who has a mission beyond the borders of the house, constantly looking out through her binoculars for some unknown. Accompanying this montage is a kid narrating how the various parts of an orchestra come to harmony, distinguishing four sections of instruments corresponding to the four parts of the family; the youth as an omnipotent voice observing an orchestra/family deconstructed, also being played by the young brothers who seem to intuitively understand the larger theme in this house.

On the other side of the island at a Boy Scout camp, the troubled orphan Sam (Jared Gilman) has plans to ditch his surroundings and meet Suzy so they can run away together. But it’s a hapless excursion, restricted to an ancient Native trail that leads to an inlet, their ultimate destination. We can only imagine that along this trail, Native initiation rituals took place. Retracing these steps unconsciously signifies the transformation of childish escapism from outer forces into a maturing exploration of inner-self. At the inlet, they baptize themselves in chaos, randomly diving into the water simultaneously, a transformation for Sam, who wouldn’t go near water without a life preserver before. He’s growing into his adolescence, becoming more comfortable with femininity, having come from a militant group of Scouts who make order out of chaos. On the other hand, Suzy, representing femininity – she’s in touch with fantastical and artistically creative, intuitive – initiates her adolescence with Sam piercing self-made earrings to her ears. They’ve now come together as one, celebrated in an awkward dance; harmonizing opposites.

But it won’t be long before society halts them. The community is in a frenzy searching for both children, entering Scout Master Ward (Ed Norton) and police Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) into the story. Ward is bad at his job; there’s clearly something he’s compensating for by being here. Captain Sharp should be a protector of order, but he’s having an affair with Mrs. Bishop, making him a contributor of chaos. Mr. Bishop calls out both for failing at their jobs, leading to the disappearance of the children. Ward had sent his Scouts out to find them, which only provoked a bloody battle that ended up with a dead dog. The dead dog tells us anything can happen in this story, that we aren’t safe in the quirkiness of this world. In fact, the quirk is mimicking the earnestness of childhood clashing with emotional barriers constructed in adulthood, which is why characters seem to speak so straightforward.

After they’re found and returned to their community, they slowly journey towards individuation, becoming accepted, making new friends, who have all been changed by their ritualistic experience. Sharp keeps watch on Sam while Suzy struggles at home with the broken family she wanted to escape in the first place. There’s an impending hurricane the Narrator said is sure to inundate most the island, and the two young lovers have to complete their final rituals before it hits.

I won’t say what follows, only that there’s a biblical trajectory in the form of Noah’s Ark, culminating in a society having to reinitiate themselves in order for healing to occur. This is a community that will have to rediscover themselves in the face of tyranny, to find common bonds, or else the future threatens collapse. In renewing communal bonds with individuals, the old order dies, and the newly matured community can rise from the ashes; Narrator tells us the quality of crops have been extraordinary since the flood! For anyone frustrated by the metaphoric meaning of the Noah’s Ark myth, Moonrise provides a rich context about societies reaching the end of a cycle and metamorphosing. It is the necessity of youth identifying the cracks which bring about this transformation. The society that fails to hear it’s youth will crumble, for they are more closely linked to symbols and rituals that collectively remind us of what it means to grow up, who we are as a society, what binds us, and where we should go.

Every aspect of this film is meticulously conceived by Anderson in relation to it’s themes and mythology, right down to the film stock. It’s an odd choice that he’d film it on 16mm celluloid, but that’s him literally choosing an ‘adolescent’ film stock, less mature than 35mm but not as infantile as Super 8. The film is graded to a dominant yellow hue, a transitory, primary subtractive color that has the most blending capabilities. Yellow is the most spiritual, ethereal primary color; it’s appropriate in a film about spiritual rituals that transition us from individual to communal. That there is a narrator speaking from the future suggests the timelessness of the space we perceive the story from. He is a reliable narrator who even interacts with the other characters by pointing them to Suzy and Sam’s hiding place. Along with Robert Yeoman’s  theatrical cinematography and Alexandre Desplat’s charming score, Moonrise Kingdom is one of the most endearing pictures from the incomparable Wes Anderson, and a handy morality tale that can be passed on for generations.

Special thanks to YouTuber’s Lesson’s From the Screenplay and Storytellers

From Focus Feaures. Directed by Wes Anderson. Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola. Produced by Jeremy Dawson, Steven Rales, Scott Ruin. Cinematography by Robert Yeoman. Edited by Andrew Weisblum. Music by Alexandre Desplat. Starring Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Ed Norton, and Bob Balaban. Rated PG-13

Now available on Blu-ray and DVD