Scouting Out a Paradise: Books, Music and No Adults (Published 2012) (2024)

Wes Anderson makes films about small worlds in which big things happen: love, heartbreak, calamities, death. In his latest, the wondrous storybook tale “Moonrise Kingdom,” a girl and a boy, both 12, run off to a remote inlet on an island where most of the adults seem disappointed and more than a little sad. The girl and the boy are very serious — about love, their plans, books, life itself — and often act older than their age. She wears bright blue eyeliner; he puffs on a corncob pipe. You wonder what their hurry is, given that here adulthood, with its quarrels, regrets and anguished pillow talk, can feel as dangerous as the storm that’s hurtling toward the island, ready to blow it all down.

The two young romantics in “Moonrise Kingdom,” which opened the 65th Cannes Film Festival on May 16, are gifted and, according to grown-ups who are supposed to know about such things, problem children. Suzy (Kara Hayward) definitely knows this about herself because she discovered a copy of a pamphlet, “Coping With the Very Troubled Child,” on top of the family fridge. She does have a temper, but she also has three younger brothers, which may help explain her tantrums. Yet, like many characters in Mr. Anderson’s films, she’s also troubled on a deeper level, beset by an existential despair that waned when, while getting ready for a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Noye’s Fludde” a year earlier, she met her match, her soul mate, her co-conspirator, Sam (Jared Gilman).

The film opens shortly before the two rendezvous in a field — she brings her favorite books in a suitcase; he brings her flowers and the camping gear — and head off on a journey that’s part quest, part romance, with a touch of film noir and a hint of the French New Wave. Along the way, there are dangers, both natural and human, and finally paradise, in a small, pretty cove they rename Moonrise Kingdom. (Working with his regular cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, Mr. Anderson softens the colors and gives them the slight tint of a faded Polaroid photograph.) There, with a tent, a French pop song and unembarrassed honesty (Sam warns Suzy that he may wet the bed), they consummate, metaphorically, an enchanted, chaste affair capped with a hilariously symbolic deflowering.

Like many of Mr. Anderson’s films, including his last one, the truly fantastic “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” there’s a deliberate, self-conscious once-upon-a-time quality to “Moonrise Kingdom.” From the minute the film opens, quickly settling on a needlepoint image of a house — a representation of the one in which Suzy lives, where it all begins — Mr. Anderson, who’s more fabulist than traditional realist, underscores the obvious point that you’re watching a story. This heightened sense of self-awareness is underscored by the exhilarating camera movements that sweep across the house from right to left, left to right, and up and down, and take you on a time and space tour through the house, past Suzy’s father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, both touching).