Fly Away Home: THE PAINTED BIRD

Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird is a feat, above all else, of cinematography and commitment to tone. For it is a bleak story of misery and abuse that runs for nearly three hours in essentially uninterrupted grimness. Only the matter-of-fact beauty of its painterly filmic black and white photography — a scope landscape filled with stormy shadows and pale light dancing in the gorgeous grain — provides a spark of hope in this darkness. It is a litany of calamity — ugly, intimate, personal — on the margins of a grinding historical tragedy. Adapting the novel of the same name by Jerzy Kosiński, it follows a story of a young boy (Petr Kotlár) who is lost, abandoned and adrift in struggling war-torn villages of eastern Europe during World War II. He moves from miserable vignette to more miserable vignette, finding adults at every step consistently misusing him. They mock him, sell him, hit him. He sees violence, torture, and sexual exploitation. He’s even buried in the ground with just his little head poking out above the surface, the better for birds to pick at his scalp while he screams and cries. It’s not always that intense, but it’s all disturbing to one degree or another. Each tableau of human misery is exquisitely photographed and artfully designed, cut and framed in long, languid takes to emphasize the matter-of-fact horror of each moment. It’s unflinching and unsparing, though it’s also carefully arranged such that it’s easy to step back and marvel at the technique and shake ones head at the procession of terrible events that befall this painfully sympathetic vulnerable innocent. Kotlár gives a tremendous child performance, with intensely pensive eyes and an ability to hold a blank face, perfect for maximum Kuleshov effect. He is surrounded by terrific experienced actors — Udo Kier, Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsagård, Barry Pepper, and more. But even their more famous visages, sprinkled throughout the film’s endurance-test length, hardly puncture the brutal and brutalizing mood. It’s an endless line of unimaginable physical and emotional pain strung along with the austere beauty of a borrowed Euro-art-house style that connects it to similarly pensive patient devastations a la Bergman or Tarkovsky. Theirs were enlivened by a sense of discovery, thoughtfulness, and humanity. Here, instead, is a film solely focused on the evil that men do. “Isn’t that awful?” is about the extent of its ideas, however masterfully conjured the images.

High Buffoon: THE RIDICULOUS 6

I can’t imagine The Ridiculous 6 will exist in the public imagination as much more than the response to a slew of trivia questions. It’s the answer to: What was Adam Sandler’s first direct-to-Netflix feature? What 2015 comedy had some of its Native American extras walk off the set in protest? What movie featured David Spade as General Custer, Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain, Blake Shelton as Wyatt Earp, and Dan Patrick as Abraham Lincoln? As you can see, the bar isn’t set too high for this Western riff starring and co-written by Adam Sandler, who continues his attempts to make comedies with as few jokes as possible. It’s part of a peculiar pattern in which a passable Adam Sandler comedy (like the nasty, gross, and more funny than not That’s My Boy) does worse at the box office than his movies that are lazy (Grown Ups 2) or lethargically offensive (Blended). At least with Netflix keeping a tight lid on their viewing numbers, it’ll be hard to say how much audiences respond to an irritatingly insensitive movie that’s mostly lukewarm Western tropes pushed a few inches further into silliness.

The plot is awfully simple. (If you think, “the better to hang a bunch of jokes on,” you’ll be sadly mistaken.) Sandler plays White Knife, a white boy raised by an Apache tribe after his mother died. He discovers his long lost father (Nick Nolte) only to find that the old man has run afoul of a mean band of bandits (led by Danny Trejo). In order to save his dad, he wanders around rounding up a Ridiculous posse of his six freshly-discovered half-brothers, the joke being that pop slept with such a variety of women in the Wild West that he’s the biological father of a diverse group of men including Terry Crews, Taylor Lautner, Rob Schneider, Jorge Garcia, and Luke Wilson. They get into arguments and confrontations in all manner of typical Western locales involving a whole bunch of actors (Harvey Keitel, Steve Zahn, Will Forte, John Turturro, and more) who must’ve decided they’d like a Netflix paycheck. No one on screen seems to care, projecting a low-energy void of interest in every direction.

Stretching out to two hours in length, the movie putters around saloons and High Noons, prairies and campfires, hangings and shootouts. Once in a while there’s a funny joke – an Apache chief says, “Sometimes the white man speaks the truth. Like one in 20, 25 times” – but mostly there’s dead air, or attempts to wring humor out of mental disabilities, musty racial stereotypes, and anatomical references (and fluids of every kind). It’s the sort of movie where Sandler’s attractive Native fiancé (Julia Jones) is named “Smokin’ Fox,” a tone-deaf, cringe-worthy hat-trick of objectification, appropriation, and ignorance. Sandler with co-writer Tim Herlihy (in their eleventh collaboration) could’ve straight-up parodied Westerns (the title clearly looks back to The Magnificent Seven and forward to The Hateful Eight) loading the frame with ZAZ-like anything-goes goofs Airplane! style. (Somehow I doubt Blazing Saddles social satire was ever within their reach.) Instead they often play things relatively straight, hoping peculiar casting, oddball characters with prominent physical traits (buck teeth, false eyes, etcetera), and disgusting gags (like decapitation or defecation) will elevate a subpar script into something funny.

It’s not actively repulsive, but the jokes aren’t there and the pace is beyond belabored. At least director Frank Coraci (who previously directed the star in Blended, Click, The Waterboy, and The Wedding Singer) provides filmmaking of a marginally less lazy type than usual Sandler fare, though not as smooth and fast as Chris Columbus did last summer with the better, but still mediocre, Pixels. More interested in looking like a Western than having good jokes, Ridiculous 6 hired cinematographer Dean Semler, whose work on the likes of Dances with Wolves and Young Guns certainly informs his widescreen landscapes here. It looks and moves like a real movie, which is faint praise, but when you’re comparing it to the inert overlit blandness of something like Grown Ups 2, it’s worth pointing out. But reasonably pleasant framing doesn’t alleviate the desert of humor so dry and slow tumbleweeds roll through with greater regularity than laughter. It's depressing and endless.

Olden Days: YOUTH

A fairly routine contemplation of aging, Youth spends its opulent and repetitive time circling the contours of an elderly man’s worldview. He is Fred (Michael Caine), a retired composer and conductor who is staying at a luxury hotel and health spa in Switzerland’s picturesque countryside. The views are fantastic, the amenities deluxe, and the guests an odd collection of minor celebrities and assorted weirdoes. Diagnosed by his daughter (Rachel Weisz) as perhaps incurably apathetic, he spends his time going for long walks, sitting in hot tubs, getting massages, chatting with strangers, and hanging out with his oldest friend (Harvey Keitel), a filmmaker holed up with a bunch of doughy young writers hammering out a script for his next project. Director Paolo Sorrentino conducts these happenings in endless cyclical loops, through recurring discussions, discursive cuts to tableaus of other guests’ activities, and lyrical juxtapositions. It’s visually robust, but intellectually thin, as hypnotic and it is tiresome.

Caine brings an air of exhaustion to his performance as a man who has had a long and interesting life, but now finds himself preoccupied with what he’s lost, what he can no longer remember, what he hasn’t the energy for. In an obvious metaphor, Keitel has a younger colleague look at a mountain through a telescope. “It seems so close,” she says. (Never mind why she seems surprised by how the device works, I suppose.) That’s what it’s like to be young and looking to the future, he says, before asking her to look through the wrong end of the telescope. That, he says as if he’s brilliant, is being old and looking at the past. They’re always looking back. The old men wander the grounds of the resort discussing old memories, contemplating mortality, worrying about their legacies, and people watching: speculating about a mute old couple, staring at singers and mimes, and ogling pretty young women. (It’s Europe, so naturally portions of the spa are clothing optional, a fact on which Sorrentino certainly loves to linger.)

We’re trapped in this mindset of enfeebled masculinity, two old friends shuffling towards the end. Even the relatively younger characters seem burdened by the aging process, pained beyond their years – Weisz’s daughter character facing a bad breakup, a famous actor (Paul Dano) wishing he could do more important work. It’s all part of the creaky fog, the psychologically stifling connection to a vision of the world that’s more than a little musty. It’s not just that the wrinkled guys keep each other up to date on their urination habits and talk about broads they don’t remember sleeping with – part of its parade of not-so-insightful cheap details about getting older. Here’s a movie that hates pop stars and reality TV, has a character deride another’s past “experimenting with homosexuality,” and parades pretty women through scenes for the express purpose of making the men feel better about themselves. (Ditto frumpy or obese hotel workers and guests who are posed in displays against the rich décor in ways that accentuate luxurious grotesqueness.)

In fact, every woman in the movie is either a problem to be solved by a man (the only solution to Weisz troubles is to date a hotel employee who comically bugs out his eyes when he first sees her) or an object to be appreciated on aesthetic grounds. In one scene Sorrentino has a beauty queen (Madalina Diana Ghenea) – a character who, in a previous scene, was mocked for wanting to change careers – parades nude in front of Caine and Keitel at an otherwise empty pool for no reason other than to show off for their benefit (and ours, I suppose). What a relief, then, to find Jane Fonda stride into the picture for one glorious scene. She plays an actress who arrives at the hotel to turn down an offer Keitel has sent her. In an exquisitely played monologue, she punctures the movie’s airless cranky old man self-involved self-regard.

Sadly, the film returns to her for an additional quick scene that dilutes her righteous feminist fire by making her seem helpless and deranged (sadly of a piece with the rest of the film). But at least she snaps off a great line that inadvertently deflates the surrounding pretentions: “Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit.” If only the movie took its own wake up call. It’s a work of great surface beauty, Luca Bigazzi’s handsome cinematography filled with striking compositions. Sorrentino floats through convincing performances and lush production design with such ease, it’s possible to slip out of the narrative and enjoy it as a sensation, a parade of interesting images. The problem is only that Youth keeps insisting it’s adding up to some import, making some keen insights into the minds of its characters, or into the very process of living life to the fullest at every age. Such ambitions only lead to starkly reveal how empty and shallow it is. Sorrentino has prepared an elaborate airy dessert, but served it insisting it’s the entire meal.

Digital Killed the Video Star: THE CONGRESS

Ari Folman’s The Congress is a rare movie that starts with a nugget of inspiration and then imagines faster, imagines farther, until we’ve arrived at something we’ve never seen before. By the end, it’s far lovelier, messier, and more haunting than I had expected. It’s a mixture of sharp live-action and fluid animation, a hallucinatory philosophical science fiction dark comedy of sharp emotional pangs and chilly unease, a swirl of influences very loosely adapted from a novel by Solaris author Stanislaw Lem. It confidently becomes something singularly mesmerizing.

The film begins as a bone-dry showbiz satire, set in a near-future Hollywood where computer technology has advanced to such a degree that studio executives are contemplating a post-human business model. No more need for celebrities and all their attendant foibles. Instead, movie stars will be richly rewarded for a one-time full-body, full-emotion scan that will be uploaded for all eternity into the companies’ databases. Their forever young virtual doppelgangers can act in whatever projects the studio desires while the real people go off to be forgotten, never to act again.

This is the offer presented to Robin Wright in the film’s opening stretch. She was once in The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump, and lately has been turning up in a stream of fascinating roles. Here she plays Robin Wright, an actress who was once in The Princess Bride and Forrest Gump, but has found the stream of good roles dried up. It’s an alternate universe version of herself, an out-of-work actress living in a former airplane hanger with her teenage kids (Kodi Smit-McPhee and Sami Gayle). They talk, fly kites, eat meals, and care for her son’s medical problems as diagnosed by a kindly doctor (Paul Giamatti)

Folman’s approach to these early scenes is patient and considered, letting conversations play out in long takes precisely framed. The family dynamics are tenderly felt, while scenes of showbiz are calculating power plays. Her well-intentioned agent (Harvey Keitel) stops by and begs her to take a meeting with the head of Miramount Studios (Danny Huston). After some negotiation (she won’t allow her digital incarnation be used for sci-fi, porn, or Holocaust dramas), she’s uploaded. It’s a masterful sequence of sci-fi light and shadow, flickering raw emotions captured forever in a geodesic flashbulb dome while Keitel’s warm voice delivers a heartfelt monologue about the way showbiz sells people for the public’s consumption.

We skip ahead 20 years. What follows is an earnest expression of identity and technology, of who we are and how our relationship to evolving societal machinery may change us. To renew her contract, Wright goes to a fancy resort hotel in what’s called the “Animated Zone.” People can ingest chemicals that create shared delusions, Entertainment Industrial Complex-approved pharmaceutical fantasies. The film becomes a piece of surrealist animation, full of shape-shifting landscapes where size, speed, and distance are a matter of mind over matter. The inhabitants walking around can make themselves into whatever appearance they desire.

The film explodes with color and design as if it is Satoshi Kon’s Paprika dreamworlds by way of a hypothetical post-modern Hieronymus Bosch and Ralph Bakshi co-directed Silly Symphony. There’s nothing consistent except inconsistencies, an entertainment bacchanal of fluid distractions in a state of flux. On giant screens we catch glimpses of Wright’s digital double’s films – beamed directly into the brains of these revelers. She’s a superhero in one. In another she’s aping a famous Dr. Strangelove shot. But no one recognizes the real deal walking amongst them. Everyone is carousing in this animated fantasy playland, but no one’s really connecting. They’re alone together.

Folman’s work in imagining this future of virtual reality hallucinatory living is at once liberating and debilitating. He imagines a future where people can manipulate their appearances however they wish, free at last from constructs of race, gender, orientations, or disabilities, and able to simply live as a group without prejudices or fear. No matter how you’re born, you can huff a chemical and be whatever you wish. And yet few seem to be aware of the others with which they interact. Everyone’s an avatar. Wright meets a seemingly helpful man (Jon Hamm), and they strike up a relationship of some kind as the animation world is turned upside down by talk of revolution. (Some shout, “We’re going to be real again!”) But she never sees his real, un-animated face. We don't either.

In the future of The Congress, everyone is allowed to live in their own subjective reality, cultivating their persona and constructing their own bubbles of infotainment. Sounds familiar. It’s our present-day struggles with technology reflected and refracted, stretched to absurdity and made frighteningly obvious. Furthermore, it’s a movie that starts with sharp jabs at Hollywood’s commodification of persons before drifting off into the future, implicating us all in its haze of existential amorphousness. Culture in this film is poisonous, turning real performers into ultimate studio-system puppets, malleable, compliant, consumable – sometimes literally so. One sniff and you’re Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, Thriller-era Michael Jackson, or Leone-era Clint Eastwood. You can drink celebrity, taste persona, and feel total possession over stars and their iconography while living your dreams and never waking up.

This film is a feat of imagination that dares to be a weird, expressionistic, emotional view of the future. It moves with the logic of a dream and the undertow of a nightmare, full of sights so striking and unexpected that they colonized my imagination and left me dazed. Wright falls into this future deeper and deeper, losing herself to better find herself, to reclaim her identity, and find her way back to her family, or what’s left of it, as best she can. There’s a deep longing for connection, for purpose, for sense. It’s woozy, disorienting, and effective. “How do I know when I’m dreaming?” Wright asks. It’s a good question, and one not easily answered.

Folman, whose previous feature, the semi-autobiographical Waltz with Bashir, was a similarly deeply felt animation experiment, here paints gorgeously strange images of shifting bodies with wiggling limbs, planes flapping their wings, fields turning into waves, vials of chemical bliss and disorienting subjectivity. Rare cuts back to live action send the head spinning. The film’s imagery swam in my mind so strongly and vividly that I left feeling like I was waking up from a peculiar, personal, and powerful vision.

A Story Told in a Twilight: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a caper perched between the World Wars. Writer-director Wes Anderson (inspired by the writings of Austrian author Stefan Zweig) creates an abstracted Old World caught as it is disappearing, a colorful fantasy Europe that’s poisoned by drab fascist forces and left forever changed. In true Anderson fashion, he’s designed his fictional European country (Zubrowka, he names it) as a candy-colored dollhouse of meticulous design. At the center is The Grand Budapest Hotel of the title. It’s a wondrous creation, a massive structure nestled in the Alps where it looks for all the world like a hotel Rankin and Bass characters might’ve passed on their way to the North Pole. Its exterior is a pale pink, floors stacked like a cheerfully, elaborately frosted wedding cake. Inside, a lushly carpeted and handsomely furnished labyrinth of luxuries wraps around itself in a square that forces guests and employees alike to walk in crisp geometric patterns. At this Hotel, a caper is hatched, a war encroaches, then years later a writer is inspired. Still later, that writer’s work lives on, calling us back into its melancholic past.

Layers upon layers, the film is a memory inside a book inside a movie. As it begins, a young woman opens a book and begins to read. The author (Tom Wilkinson) appears to us in his office, ready to recount the time he first heard the story his book relays. We see The Author as a Young Man (Jude Law) at the Grand Budapest in the late 1960s, now a cavernous, sparsely populated space not too far removed from The Shining territory, albeit without the supernatural elements. The author meets a lonely old man (F. Murray Abraham) who invites the author to hear the story of how he became the owner of the hotel. Intrigued, the author agrees. And so back once more into the past we go, to the 1930s, when the Grand Budapest was at its peak. For each time period, Anderson designates a different aspect ratio, boxy Academy Ratio 30s stretch into anamorphic late-60s, before growing shallow and simple in 16x9 present day. It’s as mischievous as it is exact, moving through time with clear visual orientation.

The film spends the bulk of its time in the 1930s. We meet Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), a supercilious dandy who manages the Grand Budapest Hotel with a suave charm and a composed pompous sincerity. His new lobby boy (Tony Revolori) tells of the man’s peccadilloes, namely wooing the little old ladies that visit the hotel. These early passages operate with a dizzying fizz, whiffs of the Lubitsch touch generating much sophisticated posturing and door-slamming farce. Anderson here, working with deep focus lenses and finely calibrated tragicomic performances, has the giddy architectural design of Lubitsch’s silents and the bubbly urbane wit of his talkies. The boy and his boss move through a world of color as vivid as in any Powell/Pressburger film, helping the Grand Budapest’s guests in any way they can. Fiennes and Revolori’s performances are nicely synchronized, the former a fatuous perfectionist, the latter a wide-eyed innocent whose deadpan acceptance in the face of disbelief and disaster balances it out.

Through briskly delivered dialogue and a lovely score by Alexandre Desplat, the metronome is set perfectly for a caper that’s about to erupt, escalating in suspense and incident at an engaging tempo. As the plot gets underway, one of Gustave’s very rich elderly lovers (Tilda Swinton, beneath a generous application of makeup) has died. At the reading of the will, all her most distant acquaintances arrive, shocked to hear that the hotel manager has been left her most valuable painting. While her lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) assures her son (Adrian Brody) that this late-arriving addendum must be authenticated, Gustave and his lobby boy abscond with the painting and take off for the Grand Budapest. Soon, the woman’s son’s thug (Willem Dafoe), a missing butler (Mathieu Amalric), a fascist Inspector (Edward Norton), a scowling prisoner (Harvey Keitel), a sweet baker (Saoirse Ronan), the leader of a team of concierges (Bill Murray), and more get pulled into a scampering plot involving locating, hiding, or aiding and abetting the movement of this most desirable painting.

All the while, the threat of violence looms large. Soldiers brutishly ask travelers for papers. Guards are stabbed to death. A pet meets a gory end. Fingers are misplaced. The film is crisply playful in unspooling its brisk and wry heist plot, loving in its evocation of period-appropriate cinematic touchstones, from the aforementioned Lubitsch and Powell/Pressburger to a mountain cable car right out of Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich. It’s affectionately constructed, miniatures adding whimsy that somehow doesn’t distract from the real menace in the action.  Nonchalant gore, periodic splashes of vibrant red and matters of life and death in an otherwise charmingly pastel, idealized Old World Europe maintains reality as an inescapable intrusion. No matter the perfectly constructed melancholy nostalgia, the violence of greed and war are an inevitable erosion of this ideal.

The fizzy sophistication of loose permissiveness as signified by Gustave’s unflappable reign of pleasure in the Grand Budapest grows frazzled and tossed as he’s thrown, by his plotting and by the march of time, into danger and exile, on the run from dark intimations of violence and despair. Though, like a typical Wes Anderson protagonist, he projects confidence, even when circumstances are at their most dire. He thinks he’ll get by because that’s all he’s ever planned on. He carries himself with great sense of purpose, even when stumbling into situations deteriorating rapidly, falling into doom, or at least humiliation. The entire oddball ensemble has characters similarly driven towards their goals, a perfect set of traits for people in a story of careful caper construction. When the cogs fall into place and the wheels make their final turn, interlocking every variable, it’s most satisfying, indeed.

For Anderson, film is an artifice, but his style is never an affectation. His pictorial beauty (again with his usual cinematographer Robert Yeoman), visual wit, symmetric blocking, high angle shots, laconic profundities, dead-pan peculiarities, 90-degree whip pans, finicky fonts, cutaway gags, witty repartee, and editorial precision (this time with editor Barney Pilling) add up to an intensely personal and deeply felt playfulness. He comes by his style honestly, carefully, a magic blend of planning and happenstance. It’s all too easy to imagine making a mockery of such meticulousness, but all Anderson parodies miss the depth roiling within the rich and lovingly assembled surfaces. Here is a film that’s on one level a lark, with its bouncy caper, funny lines, and familiar faces. Crescendos of tension and suspense build into action sequences of tremendous delight and dips of apprehension. But underneath sits the darkness.

Here he creates a world of colorful eccentricity soon to be snuffed out, or at least irreparably damaged, by the marching armies at the border. After it all, the Grand Budapest remains, but the world it represents can only be accessed through stories. Layers upon layers of storytelling, of artifice, are not arbitrary comic filigrees or distancing effects. Here the tragedies of the past linger with overwhelming melancholy as we back out of our main story, to the old man who at one point stops his tale to wipe back tears, to the young woman who cherishes the book in which it was immortalized, to the audience as the lights come up and the credits roll. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a totally enveloping aesthetic pleasure, funny and exciting, sharp and sad, so very moving, so completely transporting.

Goodbye, Children: MOONRISE KINGDOM

During the summer of 1965, on a small island of the coast of Maine, a 12-year-old boy (Jared Gilman) slips away from summer camp to meet up with his secret pen pal, a 12-year-old girl (Kara Hayward) who lives with her family on the other side of the island. The boy and the girl, friendless and lonely, figure themselves romantic adventurers, meant to head off on their own and care for each other in the wilds of this island. He has learned much about surviving in the woods from his camp days. He proudly wears a coonskin cap and plans out their hike with itemized checklists and carefully studied maps stuffed in his bag amongst his compass and air rifle. She has learned much about adventure from library books about brave girls going off on their own to become magical heroines. She packed as many as she could fit in her suitcase, along with her favorite record, a portable battery-powered record player, a pair of left-handed scissors, and her pet cat.

These items reveal that their excursion originates from a particular childhood understanding of running away, but the new feelings stirring inside them, of curiosity, attachment, caring and, yes, perhaps even love, feel so strong and immediate. In self-confident, yet halting ways these kids begin to see their adventure writ larger and more passionately on their hearts. The boy is an orphan and the girl is emotionally troubled and from an eccentric family. To them, this is not just an attempt to flee lives they find inadequate and have a fun time together. They’re fleeing into their fantasies and the merging of their imaginations becomes not just a woodsy adventure or a lovely camping experience, but a grand romance with two budding lovers on the run. The boy’s peppy scout leader (Edward Norton, with a gee-whiz wholesome exterior) has marshaled his remaining campers and joined forces with the island’s sole police officer (Bruce Willis, bespectacled and business-like) to track down the runaways. The girl’s family – three small brothers, a worried mother (Frances McDormand, tightly-wound) and a slow-boiling depressive father (Bill Murray, looking through sad, tired eyes) – join in on the search as well, which is rather patient, considering the circumstances.

This is Moonrise Kingdom, the new film from the distinctive and consistent Wes Anderson who takes this opportunity to populate one of his terrifically realized dollhouse worlds to make a film with a simple, sweet, and emotionally open surface, and a beautiful, moving emotional complexity underneath. Unlike his earlier films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, which are in large part about people trying desperately in various neurotic ways to prevent the collapse of familial relationships, this is a film that locates its concerns directly on the border between generations, finding a little community trying to work together, a ragtag collection of flawed adults and precocious children out to find two of their own. (The group picks up small, funny roles for Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Harvey Keitel as it goes along.) It’s a situation in which adults might realize how childish they behave, in which children try on identities they imagine belong to more mature perspectives. Finding the humor inherent within, Anderson (who wrote the script with Roman Coppola) balances scenes of arch dialogue matter-of-factly stated and cartoonish delight elaborately staged – like a treehouse perched at the very top of a tall tree in a scout camp run with a regimented, militaristic structure – with scenes of striking emotional honesty and clarity.

This is a film full of delicate scenes, tenderly acted by Gilman and Hayward, the young leads. This is their first film and Anderson has helped them create such confidently, wonderfully drawn characters, located so precariously on the edge of childhood, but not quite ready to tip over into full-blown adolescence. Each of these kids has moments where they look straight-ahead into the camera in tight close-up and reveal such deep feelings, which only adds to their soft kindness and moments of adorable precociousness. Their relationship – love, or something like it – develops with an emotional truth that is often (unfairly) not associated with Anderson’s exacting mastery over the formal elements of filmmaking. Torn between the worlds of childhood imagination and problems of adulthood, these two troubled kids run away to the woods where the privacy of shared solitude allows them to become who they think they are, deep down inside. Here is a film world of real innocence and real potential danger. This is a film with a profound respect for childhood and the perspectives and feelings of the young. Music swells and the camera moves for big moments of emotionality; to the young, any event sufficiently impactful is worthy of a personal epic. After all, the young couple first met the year before at a local church’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Noah’s ark opera, an appropriately ornate dramatic backdrop to spark puppy love. Their escape feels ripped out of the movies and informed by the adventures in the books they cart with them and the sophistication they think find in totems of adulthood (like French pop music or a pipe).

This is not a fussy film despite Anderson’s typically mannered approach and meticulous art design, which here makes the New England island setting appear to have leapt right out of a charming, slightly yellowed, mid-century storybook, a delicate world of children’s imagination nestled just-so in the midst of rugged natural terrain. The dollhouse qualities of the sets, props, and costumes are placed in a context of forest and bodies of water. The camera glides, finds stillness, and even shakes from time to time as Anderson puts delicate fantasy – heightened, but not fantastical – and relaxed farce right up against quiet scenes of intergenerational emotional connection. This is a sweet, sad comedy about comically confident children and comically flawed grown ups. Selflessly acted, but no less richly evocative, the adults in the cast allow deadpan ease to mask roiling turmoil, to blend so effortlessly with their young costars, who let turmoil settle in like they’re discovering it for the first time. The ensemble moves through the simple plot like a finely tuned orchestra, each striking different notes at different times, blending to become a whole moving experience.

Moonrise Kingdom is a deeply romantic film about change, about moving into adolescence, about the doubts, uncertainty, depression, and confusion that can follow into adulthood where such feelings can settle, creating miscommunications and dissatisfactions. It’s such an evocative portrayal of this collision of moods and sensations in a film that’s at once so contained, taking place over the course of only a few days on a small island, and yet filled with so many whimsical flourishes of Anderson’s imagination that it feels like a rich world, wonderfully, carefully designed. It’s a film full of liminal moments shot through with a potent melancholy of childhood’s end and the growing knowledge that adults have within them a deep sadness and uncertainty. Passions and interests seize the soul with intensity and then pass like an especially violent storm. And from the devastation comes new and unexpectedly fruitful growth.