Moonrise Kingdom

Comedy/Drama, 2012

94 minutes

Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray

Directed by: Wes Anderson

Written by: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola

You either adore Wes Anderson or you don’t: as for me, he sets my little hipster heart atwitter. His movies are meticulous, which means they look great… but, consequently, often focus on smaller details and quieter stories rather than on lots of action (i.e., explosions). Moonrise Kingdom is, no surprise, a simple story that, though engaging, is in no way big. It centers on a pair of preteen lovebirds in the 1960s who run away from their respective homes to live together in the wilderness of their small island. What is so charming about this movie is not simply their innocent, tentative relationship, or the comic panic that ensues when their parents, the police, and the boy’s scout master realize these children have gone missing, but rather the way all of these characters come together to inhabit their very specific world. Every detail is carefully planned and endearingly quirky: the atmosphere, while stylized, is very true to itself. As a result, the movie never feels too consciously cute. Moonrise Kingdom welcomes its viewers into its own unique corner of the world; happily, I found that it’s somewhere worth visiting.