Children feel and understand more deeply than you think they do. Adults are not fully-matured or infallible beings; indeed not by any means! Moonrise Kingdom depicts these two facts of life in the most gentle, beautiful, and humorous ways possible, with child characters who act well beyond their years and adults who act well below theirs. One of the funniest scenes has to be where Suzy's bumbling father is foggily attempting to track her in the vast meadow. With his mismatched clothing and whims that can only be characterized as childish, he strikes quite the picture. Even his facial expression in this scene, and indeed throughout the movie, verges on childlike, in its defiant innocence and set stubbornness. It seems like he is stuck in that stage of trying to gain autonomy from his overbears; but he doesn't necessarily have any, unless you count his children. Which, I suppose, it isn't necessarily fair to rule out, because Suzy certainly exhausts the family's energy much in the way an adolescents overbears fatigue them. Words of wisdom from Sublime, for you adolescents and developmentally stunted 'adults': what you cannot fight, you must fuck.
When he is upset that Suzy has run away, he defiantly tells his quietly playing, self-contained sons that he is going into the backyard to chop down a tree; another reckless, destructive whim characteristic of his better years. Indeed, when the camera finds him again in the backyard next to his unsuccessful felling, he is the picture of defeat. The ease with which you can read years of exhaustion and yearning for relief in his figure are not in accordance with qualities we assign to adults in our modern world; and this is something I find to be problematic. I don't know the details of how many families practice parenting, but at least in my childhood, I was force and over-fed an illusion that my parents were nothing short of godly in their perfection and infinite wisdom. Was there any topic pertaining to which I had a question, or needed advice? Irregardless of whether they had experienced anything remotely similar, my parents were experts and to disregard them would be depraved. Not much has changed, except for my poignant epiphany some time in the beginning of adolescence, that they not only annoyed me by touting their 'perfection'; but that this claim, and many others that other adult figures would make with the confidence and self-assuredness of a blossoming toddler, had largely illusory knowledge. And little to no omniscience.
Everything I learned, I taught myself.
Well, not everything per se.
But I don't think it's fair to blame our parents completely for this. What needs to change is not our parents or our children but our attitudes towards adults in general; even the elderly. For every day I believe we are broken and remade in little ways, building, changing, and honing like a muscle or a synapse, ever adapting and learning. And as such, I don't think that it would ever be fair to characterize a human (especially) as 'fully-grown' in every sense of the word; fully experienced, fully knowledgeable. The most important thing our parents can teach us is that we should not be afraid of the world, we should grapple with it (and we smay not always win), and that we must learn to teach ourselves.
Everything I learned, I taught myself.
Another memorable symbol of the child-adult paradigm is Suzy's garish eyeshadow. It's a pull between the way we usually patronize children as little people who always want to grow up too fast, and the fact that Suzy, despite her age and childish insistence that she is adult (see: eyeshadow) seems to be one of the most omniscient characters in the entire movie. Other than the gnome narrator perhaps.
Moonrise Kingdom features kind of dark subject matter, depicting such troubled twelve-year-olds. I suppose twelve is the start of adolescence and the fabled angst that accompanies, but in my memory, or at least in some picture in my mind, it didn't start being really hard until I was thirteen? (a year, what a leap), but I digress.
The film is cute because of its exaggerations, and the literal straight face with which it delivers them. And most clearly for me, this summons to mind 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Marquez, of whom I am so fond of ranting about. Marquez created magic and an ethereal beauty in his manuscript by surpassing the limits of human capacity and delivering it with a completely straight face. Straight-faced magic, as we have learned from Harry Potter, Marquez, Allende, Kafka, and now Moonrise Kingdom; all in varying degrees of literalness in regards to what is 'magical'; is the best kind of magic. It is a magic that is real, tangible, and almost seems perfectly accessible, which places it one step closer to our grasp and our understanding than literature that might be otherwise classified as 'fantasy'. Magical realism is close to our hearts because it seems close in reality. It is easier to fetishize living a dream that is somewhere in the bounds of possibility and retains vestiges of commonplace humanity, than it is to fetishize an incomprehensible reality created only (and even then in the rarest circumstances) on a fucking crazy LSD trip. Or something. But the most important point is that the creators of all of the pieces I listed made concentrated efforts to retain commonplace human qualities throughout their manuscripts; indeed, their underlying themes were more resonantly human than many of those featured in novels such as Crime and Punishment and Anthem, both of which have decidedly humanistic bents.
The magic in Moonrise Kingdom is perhaps only movie magic, meaning the usual tricks to create the sense that 'this couldn't happen in real life, or at least it wouldn't, but here you are, now enjoy your two hour escape form the throws of reality'. But I would contest that it is more than your usual movie magic, but it is similarly created through purely cinematic effects. This magic is incepted in the opening images of the movie, through the surreal, entirely external angle of the camera as it drifts from room to room as though looking into a bisected dollhouse. This shot is accompanied by a jeering, lively child's record explaining the basics of a piece of classical music, which seems to initially bear no connection to the shot other than juxtaposing the nature of the piece against the self-contained seriousness of the child characters listening to the record.
Another feature which brings magic into the movie from the start is our distanced, unelaborated-upon narrator. He sets the scene for the tale with the first spoken lines in the movie, providing a great deal of weighty foreshadowing (harken One Hundred Year of Solitude) and tantalizing snippets of scenery and verbal imagery which give an omniscient, past-tense magic to the rest of the movie. As in, you are not witnessing a current spectacle, but rather a completely fantastic flashbulb-moment in history. This is, indeed, a unique way to expose setting in a movie or book.
The fact that there cannot be surprises in a story that has technically already happened sets it apart from the chronology of your typical film. This effect combines with other manipulations in light, picture, and Desplat's whimsical score to give the film the sublime magic and humorous, rich intimacy of reliving a fond memory. The intermittent foreshadowing provided by the funny, mostly anonymous little gnome-man, creates a tantalizing hook to pull the story along, and keep the viewer engaged and not merely mollified by the cuteness and nostalgia and resonant simplicity of the film.
An anachronism in cinematography and presentation thus created from its inception, the movie only continues to be magical; and another integral part of this magic lies in the nature of the dialogue. Think of your latest chick flick or action movie. Or your latest action-chick-flick. Movie dialogue is too witty, calculated, pre-packaged, and often adulterated with sarcasm and cliche (with varying degrees of subtlety) that only help us in the illusion and the escape we seek; because normal humans aren't so perfectly spoken! Each of our words does not fall out of our mouths perfectly formed and click into the congruently-fitted crevices of our friends' minds. Moonrise Kingdom brings its magic yet another step closer to reaching out and touching us, like a fond memory created in our own minds because the dialogue hardly even resembles the fullness of normal everyday conversation, even excepting the awkwardness of small-talk. All of the dialogue is concise, almost entirely emotionless, and delivered in profound snippets that mimic thoughts more than words; which is why I elaborated on the idea that Moonrise Kingdom feeds us something that indeed already resides in our own minds. When we remember, we often annotate or abbreviate the dialogue in our thoughts; and I find this effect to an extent in the movie.
There is also a profundity in the very abruptness of the dialogue; though it starts out being very jarring, because it is not the fullness and space-filling witty banter that we are used to in the average box-office exploder, it comes that we realize that the characters express only the most basic truths which they need to survive and connect with one another. This sort of 'subsistence dialogue' is admirable, yet close (because it is something we play with in our thoughts and memories and perhaps our dreams, all the time); which brings me back to my previous points that we love it because it is close enough to fetishize, accessible and human enough not to be foreign but to be enriching, and touching. There is something so poetically beautiful about the very idea of subsistence dialogue in a politicized consumer world where words are weapons, advertisements, perhaps everything but honest expressions and simple, clean bridges between one another.
I liked the movie because it was different, because it was magical, but mostly because it created movie magic and illusion in a way I have rarely seen. Nostalgia is probably one of the most powerful of emotions, if I might go so far as to call it an emotion, and the manner in which anachronistic magic and yanking nostalgia were evoked in Moonrise Kingdom; not only in content or characters, but in the very lighting, film angles, factual dialogue and flat facial expressions, is unprecedented.
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home