Wes Anderson (that fussy man-child who made the terrific Rushmore 15 years ago and hasn’t left that world since with Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited, etc.) is a very specific kind-of filmmaker who draws a very specific kind of audience. By now, you either know if you’re a Wes Anderson fan or a hater. A person who will watch this movie and applaud at the end (as some people did) or someone who will leave the theater shaking their heads (as a couple people did). I’m firmly in the middle, but a little more to the “like him” side than the hate him side, and when he’s on fire (as he was with Rushmore and the animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) he’s a genius. Sadly, in this film, he’s not on fire.
What Works: [See above] You get it or you don’t. You either live for every one of Bruce Willis’s or Ed Norton’s or Tilda Swinton’s droll line deliveries or you stare at the screen wondering what’s so funny. Myself, I used to love Bill Murray’s droll line deliveries in a Wes Anderson film but here I wished his character would at least show the flair Steve Zissou did in Life Aquatic. [There needs to be some type of central madman shaking things up at the center like Gene Hackman in The Royal Tennebaums, and here there isn’t.] The central plot (about a love struck boy scout who runs away with a troubled beauty) likewise either works for you or it doesn’t.
What Doesn’t Work: Let’s say you’re not a pretentious douche bag and you weren’t the kind of kid who sat around listening to French records and pretending to smoke cigarettes…are you going to have a great time? I can’t say that you will. None of this is to say that Moonrise Kingdom doesn’t work or does work, just that…well, again, you have to be a specific kind of audience member.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I found this the least successful of Wes Anderson’s films besides maybe The Darjeeling Limited, so I guess what I would love for him to do is either spend the rest of his life making animated films (like The Fantastic Mr. Fox) or films that have his style but also a shred of crossover appeal (Rushmore) or, God forbid, change his style in some totally unexpected way. Imagine if Wes Anderson just made a slam-bang, gritty cop thriller or horror film or just about anything other than droll, hipster-clever independent comedies tailor made for character actors or aging comedians. To an extent, the result might look so weird it could easily be a genre masterpiece.