Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom begins with a narrator, a cross-section of a house, and a boy running through a field with a pair of binoculars. By the time it ends, a dog is dead, a boy has been struck by lightning and survived, and two twelve-year-olds have made a pact that the entire adult world around them cannot break. The film is a comedy about children who behave like adults and adults who behave like children, and it is the director’s warmest.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures Ireland.
New Penzance, September 1965
The setting is a fictional island off the coast of New England. Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) is an orphan attending Camp Ivanhoe, a Khaki Scout summer camp run by Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton). Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) lives across the island at a house called Summer’s End with her parents Walt and Laura (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), both lawyers, and her three younger brothers.
The two met the previous summer during a church performance of Noye’s Fludde. They became pen pals. The correspondence turned romantic. In September 1965 they execute a plan they made in secret: Sam resigns from the scouts and walks out of camp, Suzy leaves home, and the pair meet in a field and hike into the wilderness.
Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola drew on their own childhood memories and fantasies, and on films including Melody (1971) and The 400 Blows (1959). The result is a runaway story that treats its runaways with complete seriousness.
The search party
The Khaki Scouts discover Sam’s absence and a letter in which he states he has resigned. Ward orders them to use their skills to form a search party. Captain Duffy Sharp (Bruce Willis), the island’s police chief, joins the hunt. Sharp and Ward contact Sam’s guardians, the Billingsleys, and learn they are his foster parents — Sam is an orphan with a history of behavioral issues at home.
Suzy’s parents are drawn in too. So is a woman identified only as Social Services (Tilda Swinton), who arrives on the island and delivers a verdict on Sam with bureaucratic calm. The adults are not villains. They are tired, distracted and out of their depth, and the film lets them be all three.
The scouts find the couple first. There is an altercation. Suzy injures the scouts’ de facto leader Redford (Lucas Hedges) with a pair of lefty scissors. A stray arrow fired by one of the scouts kills Snoopy, Camp Ivanhoe’s dog. The scouts flee.
A beach called Moonrise Kingdom
Sam and Suzy hike on to Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet, which they rename Moonrise Kingdom. They set up camp. The romantic tension between them grows. They dance on the beach and share their first kiss.
This is the scene the film is built around, and it is the one that has drawn the most argument since 2012. Anderson shoots it plainly, without leering and without apology. Two children who have read too many books and trust no one but each other decide, for one afternoon, to be adults. The film does not punish them for it.
The adults catch up. A violent storm is brewing offshore. The community’s tensions — marital, professional, parental — break open at the same time the weather does.
Casting two unknowns
Anderson has said the film did not exist without the right children. “There’s no movie, if we don’t find the perfect kids,” he said of the process. Auditions ran for eight months across different schools.
He cast Gilman after finding him immediately funny — the glasses, the long hair, the voice. He cast Hayward because she read from the screenplay and spoke as if it were real life. Hayward had seen Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and played Suzy as secretive, closer to Margot than to any child.
Every child actor in the film was a novice. Anderson believed none of them had ever auditioned before. He put the successful candidates through months of rehearsal: Hayward was assigned books to read, Gilman practiced scouting skills. Lucas Hedges auditioned and Anderson could not see him as Sam, but thought him talented enough for an important part, so he became Redford.
| Actor | Role | Worked with Anderson before? |
|---|---|---|
| Jared Gilman | Sam Shakusky | No — first film |
| Kara Hayward | Suzy Bishop | No — first film |
| Bruce Willis | Captain Sharp | No |
| Edward Norton | Scout Master Ward | No |
| Bill Murray | Mr. Bishop | Yes |
| Jason Schwartzman | Cousin Ben | Yes |
| Frances McDormand | Mrs. Bishop | No |
| Tilda Swinton | Social Services | No |
The grown-ups are the film’s second joke and its second pleasure. Schwartzman took the small part of Cousin Ben without asking for more, saying Anderson always plans thoroughly what is best for his films. Murray had worked with him before. Willis, Norton, McDormand and Swinton had not.
Anderson wrote Captain Sharp imagining the deceased James Stewart in the part, then decided Willis could be the iconic policeman once the screenplay was finished.
What the film looks like and sounds like
Critics have praised the color palette and the visual symmetry, and both are doing real work here rather than decoration. The camera holds still. The compositions are centered and flat. The effect is a storybook that keeps insisting it is a storybook, which makes the moments when it stops insisting — the kiss, the dog, the storm — land harder.
Alexandre Desplat wrote the original score. It sits alongside existing music by Benjamin Britten, including the Noye’s Fludde performance that first brings Sam and Suzy together. The Britten is not a soundtrack cue. It is the reason the two of them met.
The film premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and drew critical acclaim. Its themes — young love, child sexuality, juvenile mental health, the Genesis flood narrative — were singled out for praise. It runs 94 minutes.
What holds up, and what does not
The case for Moonrise Kingdom as Anderson’s best film rests on its refusal to be cruel. The children are not freaks. The adults are not monsters. The scout troop is not a mob. Everyone in this story is doing their best with limited information, and the film’s sympathy extends even to the woman from Social Services who has come to take Sam away.
The case against it is that the style can feel like a fence. The symmetry, the deadpan, the chapter titles — they keep the audience at a fixed distance, and some viewers never get past the distance to the feeling. That is a fair complaint about Anderson’s work in general. It is a weaker complaint here, because the film’s subject is two people who have built their own small world and will not let anyone in. The style is the point.
The performances are the argument. Gilman plays Sam as a boy who has decided that competence is the same thing as safety, and Hayward plays Suzy as a girl who has decided the opposite. Norton’s Scout Master Ward is a man whose entire authority rests on a uniform and a handbook, and the film lets him be dignified anyway. Willis gives Sharp a weariness that the script only implies.
The film does have a real flaw, and it is the arrow. Killing Snoopy is the one moment where Moonrise Kingdom reaches for a darker register than the rest of the film can support. It works as a shock. It does not quite work as a story beat, because nothing before it has prepared the audience for that kind of loss, and the film moves past it quickly.
Moonrise Kingdom is a 94-minute film about two children who take each other seriously before anyone else does. It is funny, and it is sad in the right places. The style that keeps some viewers at arm’s length is the same style that lets the film treat its young runaways as full people, and that trade is worth making.
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