Wes Anderson, the director of the cult classic, Moonrise Kingdom,
makes use of camera shots, lighting, music, and the setting to set the mood and
tone for this quirky movie. Set in an older era, the summer of 1965, the story
is simplistic. It follows the forbidden love of a young girl and boy as the
society around them tries to stop their eloping. While the story mimics
Shakespeare’s well known tragedy, Romeo
and Juliet, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is much more comical. The love between
Romeo and Juliet is greatly romanticized and often sought out by popular
culture because of the characters’ passion, impulsive, and tragic
circumstances. It is not often seen as silly, trivial, or comical even though
the story takes place within a time span of approximately four or five days. Moonrise Kingdom’s
much younger protagonists, however, are harder to take seriously. To be quite
honest, none of the characters can really be taken seriously. But that’s the
point of movie. Wes Anderson takes the classic Shakespearean, romantic tragedy
and reworks it with a twist. His “Romeo” and “Juliet” are two twelve year olds
running away from home for the sake of love, but their youth makes the love
between them seem silly and trivial. Their naivety and age makes it easy for
the audience to dismiss the love between them as being “child’s play”. However,
viewers will realize by the end of the movie that the love between these two
twelve year olds cannot be more genuine. In fact, it might be the most genuine
and earnest thing in the movie. The time period in which the movie is set, the
summer of 1965, is characterized by bright pastel colors, the emerging American
nuclear family, and plastic-like artificial perfection. Wes Anderson makes use
of the time period and camera shots to flip our perception of what it earnest
and what is superficial by illustrating the society around the two characters
to be “fake” and “doll-like”. This is captured in the opening scenes of the movie.
The shots of the room are taken at a distance so that the room is perfectly
square and open to the audience like the room of a doll house. The furniture is
impeccably neat as are the children and the clothes, to the point where
everything seems slightly unnatural. The makeup of the grown women also
reflects this artificial perfection. The doll-like makeup would have been “in
style” during this particular period but it’s also purposeful. The sharp, black
eyeliner, colorful eye shadow, and pink lipstick are as artificial as the “perfect”
relationships that exist between the husbands and wives, parents and children,
and teachers and students. The characters within this film have very little (if
any) sense of humor and take matters very seriously, but that’s what makes this
film a comedy. The unexpected truth and honesty behind this very young love
reveals the superficiality of the society around them and evokes humor. It’s a contradiction
to our expectation that romantic love belongs the “adult world” and is based on
maturity; it’s a situation that is rarely seen in real life, and it’s madness.
But there is truth in the oddity of this situation which gives the simplistic
and comedic nature of the story depth.
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