A Wes Anderson ‘Kingdom’ Full Of Beautiful Imagery

Many people are rapturous over the work of Wes Anderson, and for them, I expect, Moonrise Kingdom will be nirvana. The frames are quasi-symmetrical: a strong center, often human, with misaligned objects on each side suggesting a universe that’s slightly out of balance, like a series of discombobulated dollhouses.

The movie is a Platonic romance set on an island off the coast of New England, the story of a 12-year-old girl and boy who merge their imaginative worlds. In an overture, the camera pans left to right past a series of stylized rooms in the beach house of the girl, Suzy, played by Kara Hayward. The camera lingers on an impressionistic needlepoint of a similar house — and a short time later when Suzy stares through binoculars out a window, it zooms out to show she’s inside the house in that needlepoint. Pretty cool, huh? So the whole movie is, like, this big, self-referential art object.

You could even interpret the action as unfolding in the mind of its feverishly creative boy protagonist, Sam, played by Jared Gilman, a bespectacled orphan on a Scout trip with boys who relentlessly bully him. At the start of the film, Sam has escaped from the camp, leaving the hapless but sweet scoutmaster played by Edward Norton to exclaim, “Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop!” Soon it’s clear that Sam and Suzy are making their way toward each other across the island — with the party-pooper grown-ups in pursuit.