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Showing posts with label Brixton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brixton. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
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‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a film about mental illness. We follow the story of Pat (Bradley Cooper), sufferer of a bipolar disorder. As the film opens he's being released from a state mental institution after serving a sentence for violently beating someone half to death. He suffers from intense mood swings, turning on a knife edge from happy and upbeat to depressive and violent.
David O. Russell has created a film that pulls itself in two directions at once. It’s obviously striving to present an accurate and sympathetic view of various types of mental disorder but is shackled to the conventions of the romantic comedy. These two ‘genres’ (if ‘mental illness film’ is really a genre) sit uneasily together.
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| Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) and Pat (Bradley Cooper) |
The narrative shows us Pat’s attempts to conquer his condition and reintegrate himself into a society that’s suspicious and scared of him. They’re scared of him with good reason though, he lacks a filter on his words and actions, frequently acting inappropriately and with no empathy for how he might come across to others. While he’s constantly feeling some kind of extreme emotion, he entirely lacks the apparatus to identify how he’s affecting those around him. He’ll burst into his parent’s bedroom late at night to rant about Ernest Hemingway and throw a book through the window, or run up and hug a visibly frightened ex-colleague.
Pat is not the most likeable filmic hero. Throughout the film he operates under the illusion that he’s going to get his marriage back together, which everyone around him can immediately tell is not going to happen. People try to let him down gently and get him to see that his wife probably isn’t coming back. He labours under the illusion that their love is unbreakable, even after she’s had an affair and he’s nearly beaten a man to death in front of her.
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| Pat's parents, Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) |
Into this tangled world comes the equally complicated Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s a recent widow and ever since her husband died has been undergoing an alienating nymphomania. To the obvious disgust and embarrassment of her family she’s been having sex with nearly everybody she comes across. It’s gotten to the point where she’s been fired from her job for sleeping with everyone in the office. So can these two damaged people come together and help each other with their problems?
But it’s not just our two leads that are suffering psychic pains. One of the points the film makes is that the dividing line between those that are diagnosed mentally atypical and those that appear to lead normal lives is blurred. Nearly every character in the film appears to be dealing with some kind of problem, be it an obsessive compulsive disorder, violent fits of rage or a hidden depression. Russell is much more sympathetic to those like Pat and Tiffany who are honest enough to recognise their own problems and has a deep respect for the methods they use to try and fix themselves.
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| also Chris Tucker is in this film. |
Both Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have raging internal storms constantly bubbling behind their performances. They’re portraying people that are not only volatile, but to some degree also have the knowledge that they can ‘get away with it’. The two have both been damaged in some way, so both have an 'excuse' for their actions. One of Cooper’s best tactics is to use his wide, bright blue eyes to show Pat's terrifying clearness and confidence in his actions. The disconnect between how sure he is that his course is the right one and what we in the audience know to be true makes him both tragic and fairly frightening. Cooper is confident in a difficult role, and in less skilled hands runs a risk of losing audience sympathy altogether.
Lawrence is a good match for him, her and Cooper bounce off each other realistically and reflexively. She doesn’t have quite as many emotional gears to shift into as he does, but this is more of a function of her character rather than a limitation in her performance. What she does fantastically is the transformation from reserved, cool and collected to towering, violent, frustrated rage. There’s a physical change that comes over her in one scene that’s a marvel to behold, it’s like suddenly there’s a completely different person that’s sprung out of the character.
The world that these two inhabit is as carefully constructed as the two central characters. Due to their mental states, both Pat and Tiffany live and are dependant on their parents. Russell takes the same kind of downbeat look at working class American life as he did in ‘The Fighter’, although with a slightly softer touch. The film takes place in an overcast suburbia, row after row of identical houses, identical streets and nosy neighbours. This endless downtrodden domestic conformity gets to you after a while, but does the job of making our leads stand out like sore thumbs.
It’s clear that everyone involved here is sincere in making a film that aims to educate us about what it is like suffering from or living with a person with a mental disorder. The characters are treated with nothing but dignity, even in their most unsympathetic moments we at least understand why they are doing what they’re doing. Despite this, the film does use the pretty lame cliche of saying ‘maybe the ones who’ve been diagnosed with mental illness are actually the sane ones?’
This film has genuine flashes of complexity, and when it resorts to cliché like this it falls flat. Russell goes some way to justify this by making nearly every other character in the film a bubbling pit of vague symptoms, but this ends up feeling like a clever way to dodge the point. ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ doesn’t exactly glamorise mental illness, but that fact that it propels the central love story means some of the rough edges are necessarily sanded down.
For the vast majority of the running time ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a downbeat, bittersweet indie drama. The last quarter of the film feels like it’s been parachuted in from a glossy, conventional romantic comedy. Suddenly these damaged characters that we’ve gotten to know are acting relatively normally, and the focus shifts not onto whether they’re healing mentally, but bizarrely, onto their dancing skills. The argument the film puts forward is that their dancing skills are directly linked to their mental health, but after treading so carefully on this territory for the first 90 minutes it becomes very clumsy, very fast.
It’s a let down. We have it impressed upon us that this is an impossibly complex situation with no easy solutions, but the film takes a tonal swerve, shows us that actually there are easy solutions and ties everything up in a neat little bow. A happy ending and roll credits.
Other criticisms include the fact that this film assumes you have a knowledge of American Football, and specifically know a vague history of the Philadelphia Eagles. Characters repeatedly reference events in the history of this team, which may be common knowledge in the US, but I’ve got no idea what the hell they’re talking about and there’s not enough context to figure it out.
The climax of the film involves a ridiculously complex bet on which all the emotional and financial woes of our characters rest. The set up for this bet is one of the most interminable and confusing scenes I’ve seen in a film lately, and assumes you’ve got a knowledge of both American Football and US betting lingo. There’s a protracted negotiation of ‘points’ on a bet and just when this is decided, the characters begin discussing transforming the already complex bet into a parlay (I didn’t know what this was). To be fair they include a clumsy bit of exposition after the scene is over that translates it all into plain English, but it’s too little too late. If the audience is watching the set up to the big climax and they don’t know what the hell anyone is talking about, it saps urgency from the film and replaces it with alienation and confusion.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ for the most part is an achingly sincere film that clearly cares a great deal about its subject matter. It’s got a solid core of talent and some deftly and sensitively sketched characterisation. But it can’t work out what it wants to be. Does it want to be an serious indie drama about mental illness or a conventional rom-com with two sweet, attractive leads? By trying to do both it doesn’t succeed at either.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is on general release from 21st November 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
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‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is a fantastically original, imaginative film with outstanding performances, amazing cinematography, gobsmacking production design and is jam-packed full of iconic and beautiful imagery. And I kind of despise it.
This is a tricky one to unpick and it’s taken me a while to try and work out why the film left me disappointed. On paper it feels tailor-made to my tastes, very much in the mold of ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, or a Studio Ghibli film (it’s even got giant pigs!). While in the process of watching it, it gripped my attention artistically and emotionally almost from beginning to end. But in the hours that followed after the credits had rolled I couldn’t work out why I felt a strange nagging unease that just wouldn’t go away.
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ tells the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six year old girl living in an area known as ‘The Bathtub’. Her mother is dead, and she lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry), who we soon learn is seriously ill and is teaching Hushpuppy the necessary survival skills to allow her to survive after his death. The Bathtub is a swampy island community beset by rising flood waters, every storm brings fresh catastrophe; it’s so dangerous that the government are trying to totally evacuate the area. We focus on the survival of a small community here, an eccentric and self-supporting group who refuse to leave their homes or change their lifestyle even in the face of disaster and death.
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| Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) |
This unique world is perceived wholly through the eyes of Hushpuppy. It’s a damn heavy load for a young actress to bear: the film goes to great lengths to immerse us in the world it creates but it would all be for nothing if Hushpuppy weren’t portrayed just right. Thankfully, Quvenzhané Wallis is absolutely mesmerising and Zeitlin is a lucky, lucky man to have discovered such a talented child actor. Wallis’ performance spills from her totally unconsciously, nothing she does ever feels rehearsed or calculated. This sense of spontaneity and life that Wallis imbues Hushpuppy with is a large part of why the film impresses – we don’t so much watch a performance as feel that we’re peering into her world, documentary style.
The character of Hushpuppy is very much a product of her environment, and her vibrance is echoed by her surroundings. The world of the Bathtub is a fantastic creation, a world of rich primary colours absolutely teeming with life. Throughout the film we see a multitude of swarming animal and human life. The people here seem constantly in motion, moving around the world almost like a dance. Tight closeups and roving handheld cameras allow us to follow our characters anyway they go.
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| Wink (Dwight Henry) and Hushpuppy |
This abundance of life is also shown in the food they eat and the wildlife around them. We’re repeatedly shown huge, writhing piles of crayfish which the characters tend to eat raw. Catching a catfish is shown to be as simple as putting your hand in the water and waiting a few minutes for one to bite you. This intrinsic connection these people have with nature adds up to a filmic world that the characters fit like a glove, these people exist harmony with their environment. The world feels vaguely Eden-like towards the beginning, food is everywhere, and everyone is friendly and open. But these are desperate people living in poverty, and this is a community that is constantly very close to the brink of disaster. It’s difficult to say if this film is set in the distant or near future, or even the present, but regardless it looks extremely post-apocalyptic. The fact that it’s entirely plausible the film is set in the modern day gives this post-apocalyptic imagery some pretty worrying implications.
There are a number of instantly iconic cinematic images throughout the film: Hushpuppy standing proud at the stern of her father’s improvised boat; swimming through the deep ocean, running with fireworks in her hands or staring at the entrails of a dead dog. My favourite comes in a flashback sequence told to Hushpuppy by her father. He lies snoozing on a deckchair as an alligator crawls out of the swamp towards him. Waking up, he stares in fear at it, completely frozen. Hushpuppy’s mother steps into frame and shoots the alligator with a shotgun. From the father’s perspective we see her lower body, shotgun in hand, her inner thigh drenched with blood. This single image prefigures much of what is to happen in the film, and the alligator, blood, shotgun and her reaction neatly encapsulates much of the motivations and symbology tied up in Hushpuppy’s mental picture of her dead mother – elements which are later used in different configurations in the latter half.
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| It's a beautiful film. |
All of this is pretty unambiguous praise, so why didn’t I like this film? After a lot of thought, it’s come to down to the way the character of Hushpuppy’s father is portrayed and the worrying political implications of the film.
The relationship between father and daughter is the emotional core of this film and informs almost every action that the two take. For the film to succeed we need to utterly buy into this relationship and if we don’t, then no matter how compelling your performances are, and no matter how beautifully and creatively you shoot the film the whole house of cards collapses. As Hushpuppy says:
“The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece... the whole universe will get busted.”
Which is exactly what happens. Despite all the admirable elements, the emotional core just didn’t hang together for me. When I realised that I was actively rooting against a lot of what Hushpuppy’s father does, the film lost me emotionally.
The character of Wink is explicitly presented as a man with serious flaws, he’s got a quick temper and his relationship with his daughter at the beginning of the film seems shaky at best. It’s telling that she doesn’t even live in the same place as him –relegated to her own caravan and summoned by a bell being rung. As the film progresses he hits his daughter, intentionally terrifies her, gets violently drunk, shouts at her and generally bullies her into conforming to his expectations (forcing her to ‘beast’ her crab in the dinner scene). Later in the film we see him being given some bad news by a doctor, and his reaction is to violently attack the man in the middle of a hospital, eventually only being dragged off and restrained by a hospital orderly. All of this confused me a bit. We’re supposed to be viewing everything in the film from the perspective of Hushpuppy who clearly loves her father despite his flaws but we repeatedly see him painted in a negative light. This film would be trite if he was some perfect super-dad, but the script and performance add up to a singularly unpleasant man, and it became difficult for me to empathise with, or even like him.
In some respects the film is a victim of its own success, Wallis is so good as Hushpuppy that I instinctively wished the very best for her. As a result when her father ignores the evacuation warnings and causes his daughter to risk her life during a deadly flood, its easy to condemn him. He had every opportunity to remove her from danger, but chose not to. I was a little frustrated when I realised towards the end of the film that somewhere along the line I’d lost the emotional thread, especially as people around me were sniffling into their hankies.
I also disagree with the fundamental politics of the film. Inadvertently or not, Zeitlin endorses a worryingly conservative, libertarian mindset. The characters we identify with in the film follow a simple and straightforward philosophy. They are self-sufficient, off-the-grid and proud of their land. They feel they can survive in the Bathtub without any government assistance, and violently oppose any outside interference in their lives. They’re fun, charismatic people who live an enjoyable, happy and carefree life, whereas the government is portrayed as cold, sterile and authoritarian. We glimpse distant helicopters hectoring the residents to move on, or gangs of anonymous social workers coming to forcibly drag people from their homes. Later we see a government run hospital, which is designed and shot like a repressive prison camp. The film’s imagery inescapably brings to mind Hurricane Katrina, a disaster where government assistance was desperately needed and inadequately provided. So the fear of ‘big government’ in the film sits uneasily with me – and begs the question, what kind of person would make a film where the antagonist’s weapons are state healthcare, education and housing?
It’s difficult to tell whether this is a symptom of a plot whose implications haven’t been entirely thought through, or a genuine attack on state intervention in poverty. The film seems to try and consciously gloss over its politics, taking pains to focus our attention on the overtly mythic elements in the story. I foresee an argument against this as being along the lines that examining the events of the film too logically is a mistake, after all, everything we see is filtered through the perception of a six-year old girl, with all the attendant fantasies, biases and misunderstandings. This film would prefer you to examine these characters as archetypes: Hushpuppy is not a realistic person, she is a universal stand-in for innocence and childhood. Wink should not be examined clinically and judged, he represents a complex, intermingled adult world of regret, violence and passion that’s incomprehensible to a child. Events and objects become their platonic ideals; this is not ‘a’ flood, this is The Flood, it’s not just any alligator it’s the essence of everything Alligator. The film admittedly does an excellent job of making the relatively mundane seem epic.
But I can’t disentangle the politics from this mythology. Consciously or not, the film portrays child abuse as acceptable parental behaviour, demonises socialised healthcare and shows us government intervention in poverty as sinister and oppressive. It’s a US Republican’s wet dream.
This might sound like a strange thing to say because the film can be read as a straightforward environmental parable about the consequences of global warming, which in the US is strongly identified with liberal Democratic Party politics. As far as I’m concerned global warming is not a partisan political issue: it’s a matter of hard science – personal opinion is essentially irrelevant in the face of data. The role of the state in taking responsibility for the welfare of its citizens is a political issue though. I’m watching this film in a country where the assets and functions of the state are being systematically sold off to shady private companies by a neoliberal conservative government. This film condemns these essential functions of the state, paints civil servants like social and health workers as ‘the enemy of the free’ and so plays right into the hands of an ideology I despise.
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is a wonderful piece of cinematic art, but very, very flawed. I want to like the film but ultimately I find can’t help but find it politically repugnant. This coupled with the emotional detachment I experienced in the latter scenes makes it impossible to recommend.
If anyone can convince me that I've wildly misinterpreted everything, please tell me in the comments as I'd love to be turned around on my opinion. This film contains so much stuff that I enjoyed that it's a bit sad that I find it so politically problematic.
‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is on general release from 19th October 2012
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
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It’s got to be a good sign when you feel genuine suspense and excitement during a documentary. ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ tells a fascinating, almost unbelievable story with several unexpected twists and turns (to the point where I’d recommend not reading up on it before seeing the film, this review is spoiler free though). The subject is an American singer/songwriter called Rodriguez who recorded two albums in 1970 and 1971, both of which were enormous flops. Soon after the release and failure of his second album he dropped off the radar. Word was that after a disastrous concert he’d doused himself in petrol and set himself alight on stage (described as “the most gruesome suicide in rock history”). But meanwhile, purely by chance, his album ‘Cold Fact’ began to be played and pick up fans in South Africa. It eventually became part of the soundtrack of disaffected youth during the rule of the apartheid government. The film tell us that every house with a record collection had three albums: ‘The Beatles – Abbey Road, Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water, and Rodriguez – Cold Fact’. We're told that Rodriguez is “bigger than Elvis” in South Africa. This documentary lays out the story of the search for Rodriguez, an effort to find out what happened to this mysterious man.
Very quickly you realise that this is going to be particularly beautiful film. We open with swooping helicopter shots of the South African coastline, as Rodriguez’s song ‘Sugar Man’ plays over the soundtrack. The film-makers seem at pains to establish the ‘world’ that the events take in, what the past or the present ‘feels’ like. This philosophy extends to the locations, times and weather they interview their subjects in. A notable example is a contemporary of Rodriguez being interviewed on the snowy streets of Detroit at night, he’s wrapped up but still shivering as he tells his story. This sense of place is important and appropriate – most of the songs Rodriguez sings are about the political treatment and exploitation of the dispossessed inner city poor.
The film-makers define their world through careful shot and palette control. The South African scenes are bathed in a warm orange light, whereas the Detroit scenes are cold and snowy, and tend to be shown as monochrome. All of the urban photography is brilliantly realised – a favourite sequence of mine was showing us rising up above a city in a shot that I assume was captured from a glass fronted lift. ModernSouth Africa tends to be shown in a relatively positive light, with sunny shots of the modern city, beaches and record shops whereas in contrast Detroit is shown more as an example of urban decay. There are frequent tracking shots taken from moving cars, showing row after row of boarded up shops, and desperate people struggling through the snow. If you’re trying to showcase the desperation and abandonment of a man’s failing music career, then you could hardly pick a more apt backdrop. There is also excellent use of archive footage which captures the grimy and grubby feel of 70s Detroit and later the oppressive fascism of the apartheid South African state.
In the absence of much archive footage of their subject the film uses several animated sequences to show key moments in the story, or serving as ersatz music videos for Rodriguez’ songs. These seem to capture the man’s personality and philosophy in a direct way. We see him loping along a street, guitar on his back – a distillation of the urban troubadour. In one later sequence he stands in silhouette, shifting nervously in front of a sunset - an impressive example of using body language to inform the audience of the humbleness of the man. In the absence of early 70s video of Rodriguez in his heyday this seems like most artistic way to capture his personality, and visually they’re absolutely beautiful.
It is immediately apparent that Rodriguez’s music is great. We open to the strains of ‘Sugar Man’, and the film is soundtracked by various songs of his throughout. The film wouldn’t work at all if the audience didn’t like the man’s music, and the brilliance of it is repeatedly talked up by the various interview subjects. There is a particularly nice sequence where we are played what a record company executive describes as “the saddest song he’s ever heard”, and explains how the depressing events of it seem to have functioned as a self-fulfilling prophecy for Rodriguez. Everyone seems very confused as to why his records flopped, the big-name producers who worked with him say that he was like nothing they’d seen before. A few people even get tears in their eyes when talking about him – an impressive feat considering they only worked with him briefly in the early 70s.
One of the mistakes that it’s easy for documentary film-makers to make is to over-egg the pudding. By this I mean that they take a compelling and worthy subject that they’re enthusiastic about, but don’t seem quite convinced that the audience will be as interested as them without adding a bit of hyperbole. To this end, the film paints Rodriguez as the epitome of the troubled, overlooked genius and in my opinion goes a little too far in overstating his importance in the world of music. For example, we’re told at one point that Rodriguez was a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. Rodriguez is a good songwriter, a great one even, but frankly he’s no Bob Dylan.
Rather more problematically, the film begins to paint Rodriguez as a driving force behind the abolition of apartheid. We are shown a progression of South African artists influenced by ‘Cold Fact’, who explain that the anti-establishment point of view expressed on the album was entirely novel and gave them the impetus to begin to perform music opposed to apartheid even under threat of imprisonment. The apartheid history of South Africa is shown through documentary footage of demonstrations, and clashes with the army and police, to a soundtrack of Rodriguez. It seems plausible enough that this music provided a soundtrack to the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement, but it seems a bit of stretch to paint it as a primary motivator. Notable by their relative absence during these retrospective sequences are black South Africans. There’s a scene set after the end of apartheid where the crowd seems entirely monochrome, a hall containing thousands of Rodriguez fans and not one black face among them.
It’s a bit of a shame that the film-makers felt the need the overstate the importance of their subject, as the story of Rodriguez is absolutely fascinating in its own right, and the more we learn about his philosophy and life, the more we come to respect him. He begins the film as a man of mystery, shown in moody high-contrast black and white photos, his eyes constantly masked by sunglasses. As we progress through the film, the icon is slowly humanised. We learn about his past and eventually what happened to him. I felt a sense of engrossment from the audience during the film, and there were gasps and chuckles of disbelief, and nervous laughs as the story wound its way to a close. The film is incredibly emotionally engaging for a documentary, reminding me of ‘Man on Wire’ (I later found out that these two films share a producer).
This film speaks to a common desire in all of us. In Rodriguez’s story we see a man who poured his heart and soul into his art, only to find his efforts completely ignored. His records regarded as flops, his music career a total dud, yet somewhere out there, unbeknownst to him he was a superstar. It’s the kind of warm, fuzzy feeling that gets you through the night; that someone, somewhere understands you completely and while you may toil unloved and unappreciated, you’ll eventually find your place in the spotlight.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
- 2 Comments
'Moonrise Kingdom' is happiness and affirmation in humanity distilled down to 94 minutes and projected onto a screen. It's a laser-guided riposte to the critics of Wes Anderson who moan that he makes the same beautiful but detached film over and over again. Every frame of this film is instantly recognisable as a Wes Anderson film - to the extent that if any director working today in Hollywood can be considered an auteur, it's Anderson.
'Moonrise Kingdom' is set in 1965 and follows the adventures of two 12 year olds, Sam and Suzy, as they attempt to escape a society which has left both of them troubled and miserable. We also follow their parents and the authority figures on the island who are trying to catch them.
It's a common complaint that 'all' Wes Anderson's films feature emotionally stunted adults struggling to get over past psychological injuries. The prime example, from the ur-Wes Anderson film are the three Tenenbaum children from 'The Royal Tenenbaums', but in the same vein we also have the brothers of 'The Darjeeling Limited', Max Fischer and Herman Blume from 'Rushmore' and Bill Murray's reluctant father Steve Zissou in 'The Life Aquatic'.
'Moonrise Kingdom' at first seems like an almost overly direct continuation of these themes. All of the adults in this film are miserable and somehow lost, and on surface inspection our troubled child leads seem to be heading the same way.
Our male lead, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) is a resourceful but somewhat antisocial and unpopular Khaki Scout (a direct analogue for Boy Scouts). As we begin the film he has just 'resigned' from his Khaki Scout troop and escaped into the wilderness with a stolen canoe and supplies. We learn quickly that he is an orphan, and seems to have been bounced from foster home to foster home. For someone who is apparently 'the most unpopular kid' in the Khaki Scouts, he also seems to be the most competent. His uniform is bristling with badges for various achievements, and throughout the film his outdoors skills are consistently portrayed as top notch.
Escaping with Sam is Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), 'a very troubled child'. She is the older sister of three young boys and lives with her parents in a very chic island house. She is desperately unhappy, and has a reputation for sudden acts of extreme violence. Her parents do not understand why she is so unhappy, and do not quite understand what to do with her. We are introduced to her from Sam's POV as he escapes backstage during a children's production of Noah's Ark. She is dressed as a raven, and when they meet backstage the two instantly recognise a kindred 'outsider' spirit in the other. Through a series of letters they quickly resolve to run away with each other and escape their various miseries.
On first reading, these two children seem like 'Tenenbaums-to-be'. It is easy to imagine Sam growing up to become Max Fischer, or Suzy to become a Margot Tenenbaum. What separates them from previous Anderson characters is that these two can clearly see the misery in their futures should they carry along the path they're on and make a decision to pre-emptively get away from this.
So why is this society they're being raised in so damn unhappy? They live on an idyllic island and everyone seems to be comfortably well off. It doesn't even strike us as an overtly authoritarian world to grow up in. There are a number of different authorities in the film, and all are painted in different, but similar colours.
Suzy's parents, Walt and Laura (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) are never shown as intentionally malevolent. Suzy has three younger brothers, and they all seem reasonably normally adjusted, and there is never any suggestion that Suzy's parents do not care about her. Later in the film we are shown a book that Suzy has found hidden in the house: 'Caring for the Very Troubled Child'. It's clear that rather than trying to pose as antagonists, they are trying to find some way to reach out to her, but unfortunately they are going about it in totally the wrong way. The two are lawyers, and live in a loveless and passionless marriage, it seems that all they discuss before falling asleep is the success of applications they've made before various judges. As a result, and seeming out of desperation, Laura is having an affair, and frankly is not doing a very good job of hiding it, leading to Walt's emotional numbness and detachment. Their difficulty in communicating with Suzy is spelled out in a pretty overtly literal manner - their mother walks around the house with a megaphone searching for her, both amplifying and distorting her voice.
The other authority figures on the island are Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) and Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton). Again, as with Walt and Laura, they are not presented as tyrannical, overbearing figures, but as somewhat confused and slightly sad people. They are both never anything less than kind and fair with the application of their authority.
Captain Sharp appears to be the only policeman on the island, and when we see him framed with fishing paraphernalia in his opening shot we immediately understand just how busy his job is. Captain Sharp is having an affair with Suzy's mother Laura, although frankly this seems more borne out the fact that there doesn't appear to be anyone else around to have an affair with. They're both damaged people looking for someone to confide in.
Scout Master Randy Ward isn't as obviously swirling around in the whirlpool of misery as the other adults, but nonetheless he is still experiencing a sense of gnawing ennui in his life. He seems unready for the responsibility placed upon him. When asked early in the film what his job is he responds 'Mathematics teacher', but quickly corrects himself by saying he's a Scout Master, and Mathematics teacher on the side. As with Captain Sharp he seems to care deeply about the children under his responsibility, and we clearly see his concern and worry about Sam and Suzy as he records his daily log in his tent. He is kind, but it is telling that his repeated excuse for not knowing the Sam is an orphan is that "it wasn't in his record". Talking to him directly appears to have escaped him.
All of the adults on the island are thus entirely sympathetic, and we are repeatedly shown their genuine concern and worry for the runaway children. So in the face of these perfectly reasonable authority figures, why do our protagonists decide to fly the coop and head off into the wilderness? Well, apart from their sympathy they all have one further thing in common, they have subsumed their personal responsibilities to various cold and impersonal sets of rules and codes. Walt and Laura's parents repeatedly cite laws and regulations in support of their arguments (and refer to a book to try and work out the 'rules' for dealing with their troubled child), Randy Ward sticks rigidly to the Khaki Scout rulebook and Captain Sharp is the policeman, so works according to the word of the law. All of these characters have to various degrees abdicated their sense of individuality and decision-making to cold, impersonal forces.
The ultimate expression of this theme in the film is Tilda Swinton's 'Social Services'. She has totally subsumed her own identity into that of the authority she represents. The character has no name, and refers to herself in the third person as 'Social Services'. She speaks in direct and commanding statements, "Just find the boy, and deliver him to Social Services. Nothing else is in your power." As an adult character she stands apart from the rest, an intruder into their pastel-coloured island community in her stark blue cloak. It is important than even though she is the expression of authority taken to its extreme, she is never portrayed as acting consciously wickedly. The rules say that Sam should be in 'Juvenile Refuge' and given electro-shock treatment, and she is just executing those orders. It's not a personal vendetta, and even though the end result of her plans is horrific, you know that the character sees it as an unpleasantness in aid of the greater good.
The cinematography and direction underlines these themes. The environments the adult characters inhabit are consistently portrayed as boxes, a collection of right angles and severe lines and sharp colour delineation. The Bishop house is the clearest example of his, and the opening shots of the film demonstrate precisely how we are to view the architecture of the place. The camera moves along a dolly, turning at sharp right angles in perfect parallel lines to the layout and inhabitants of the house. It's like looking into a dollhouse, an instantly recognisable Wes Anderson shot. Here it serves us thematically, boxing Suzy in. In contrast, the child escapees inhabit the natural world, as free within the frame as they are in the plot. Theirs is a world of long, looping curves, be it the sweep of the beach they fall in love on and name 'Moonrise Kingdom', or the 'Chickchaw Harvest Migration Trail' they follow on their adventure.
Faced with admittedly sympathetic yet constricting reality it is important to understand exactly what form the children's rebellion takes. They do not abandon civilisation and rules for a wild, anarchistic existence - quite the opposite in fact. They bring as much of civilisation as they need along with them on their journey. It's notable that Suzy's suitcase doesn't contain clothes and supplies, but rather books. She brings her kitten, a record player and a supply of cat food. Even in their rejection of the adult society, Sam still follows the survival rules taught to him in the Scouts, and survives admirably. Once they have been caught, the Scout Master praises Sam on the layout of his beachside campsite. But even though they have brought some of the trappings of the outside world with them, there are huge differences between the interactions of the adults and that of Sam and Suzy.
The two children act at all times with complete emotional nakedness. They only ever say precisely what they feel and seem to act at all times with utter honesty. They know exactly what they feel at any given time and act accordingly. Their romantic relationship is so pure and reflexive that there is not too much to say about it other than that they love each other, and therefore should be together. Much of the conflict in the film is generated directly and indirectly by the adults trying to process this unshakable partnership. They simply do not have a frame of reference for it. It's kind of annoying that Wes Anderson films are often accused of being overly ironic and detached. These kinds of heartfelt and genuine romantic attachments pepper his films and are generally treated utterly sincerely. There are some pretty brave scenes in the film exploring juvenile sexuality, which is a tricky subject for a director to tackle without making the audience feel a bit creepy. Anderson neatly sidesteps the issue purely by dint of the the sincerity and care with which he builds and develops the relationship.
The pivotal scene thematically in terms of the characters being governed by external rules is the marriage scene. The characters have escaped to 'Camp Lebanon' where an older boy 'Cousin Ben' (Jason Schwartzman) claims to have the semi-authority to marry them. In a great piece of dialogue he spells out that the marriage will not be at all legally binding in numerous specific ways. The characters are essentially acting out a ceremony with no authority given to it all. Sam and Suzy are repeatedly asked if they're sure they want to go through with this, and told that this is an important decision that will affect them for the rest of their lives. They are 100% sure, and are married. The film does not treat this marriage as anything less than the real thing. It is the clearest demonstration of what the film is trying to say about authority and rules: they are what you make of them, and only binding in so far as you acknowledge them. As far as the film is concerned, there is no difference between a full legally sanctioned marriage, and Sam and Suzy's. Throughout the rest of the film we have seen that sticking rigidly to the rules without consideration leads to misery and inaction and the seriousness of this ceremony accentuates it.
This is further underlined during the climax of the film. Sam and Suzy have climbed to the top of a church tower to escape the adults. A storm rages, and the adults are panicking downstairs trying to figure out a way to save them. Their solution is to utilise all their knowledge to work out a way within their particular sets of rules to save the children. Suzy's parents work out a legal argument to save Sam from Social Security, who frantically flips through a her rulebook to see if it works. It does, and Sam is adopted by Captain Sharp, who has climbed the tower and gained Sam's legal consent to do so. In the closing scene of the film we see how Sam has switched his outfit to co-opt the police authority of his new adoptive father Captain Sharp.
The impotence of rules and regulations against external forces are repeatedly demonstrated by Anderson throughout the film through natural forces (the storm) and the sheer, unshakable, romantic attachment of the two leads. The film is telling us that authority and rules have no inherent, absolute value, and that systems of control must prove their worth and utility. Anderson shows us that those who wield authority have choices as to whether to apply it either coldly without emotion or with humanity and sympathy.
I had a wonderful time watching this film, as I have every other film by Wes Anderson. His casting choices are inspired, and the two leads are an astonishingly effective piece of casting. There are those who criticise him saying that he makes the same film over and over again. It's a regressive view, and begs the question exactly what are the films he should be making? Everything about this film, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the costumes and set design is pure Wes Anderson, and it's wonderful to see a director with such a clear idea of what he wants his film to be. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by this.
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