Story Meets Style With Wes Anderson’s 'Moonrise Kingdom'

Whenever I’ve had to defend Wes Anderson to anyone – particularly those who accuse the Texas auteur of favoring style over substance – I tend to say that, in his particular case, the style is the substance. Anderson is allergic to big, phony displays of emotion, and instead prefers to distill his unique brand of sadness into minute, often fastidiously curated art objects. You can see it in “Rushmore,” when Max Fischer gives a lonely, broken Herman Blume a choice between a Punctuality pin or one for Perfect Attendance. It’s also present in 2014’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” during scenes such as the one in which the elder Zero Moustafa explains to the film’s narrator that he only held on to his rapidly deteriorating hotel because it allowed him to keep the memories of his deceased love Agatha. Those who see Anderson’s style as shallow are missing the point: he is a miniaturist, someone who compresses complicated, sometimes ugly human emotions into beguiling micro-narratives where the accumulation of small details adds to the fabric of a lived-in and authentic world of make-believe.

Whether it’s the Belafonte cruise ship in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” or the namesake train of “The Darjeeling Limited,” it’s safe to say that Anderson is drawn towards hermetic, self-styled ecosystems, and the island of New Penzance in “Moonrise Kingdom” is no exception. ‘Moonrise’ was the film where even the director’s most ardent critics had a hard time holding their noses: the film’s screenplay, penned with friend and frequent collaborator Roman Coppola, was nominated for an Academy Award and some even consider it to be Anderson’s best film. Why I myself am not huge on “Moonrise Kingdom,” at least when stacked against the rest of Anderson’s filmography, I must admit that it’s probably his most formally impressive film to date. This overt formalism is the subject of a new video essay titled “Moonrise Kingdom: Where Story Meets Style,” and it’s a finely observed and insightful mini-essay on Anderson’s bittersweet lovers-on-the-run picaresque.

The essay starts by examining the film’s screenplay, and if you’ve ever read a Wes Anderson screenplay, you know that he doesn’t adhere to the cut-and-paste, bare-bones style favored by many working screenwriters. A Wes Anderson script is one where nothing – and I really mean nothing – is left to the imagination, be it a character’s outfit or the color of wallpaper in a certain scene. The point is also made that “Moonrise Kingdom” is perhaps the most deliberately and unabashedly artificial movie from a director who frequently is criticized for his artifice. From the use of a narrator who addresses the camera directly to the books read by Suzy Bishop whose fictional flights of fancy act as a sort of ongoing meta-commentary on the film’s action, Anderson is not afraid to let you know that you’re watching a movie with “Moonrise Kingdom.” There’s also the question of the death of Snoopy the dog (Anderson is notorious for the canine deaths in his films), an act that raises the stakes of the film considerably. Apparently, Anderson and frequent co-writer Owen Wilson used to wonder if the characters in their generally gentle, sweet films could actually, y’know, die – a curiosity that was not actually fulfilled until the grisly helicopter crash that ends ‘The Life Aquatic.’ Anderson fans will want to give this a look, as will those who stand behind “Moonrise Kingdom” as one of the director’s defining works.