Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Moonrise Kingdom
2012 · Wes Anderson · Moonrise Kingdom on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera slide sideways through the house's open rooms. (camera)
Robert Yeoman tracks laterally past the Bishop home as though the front wall had been lifted away. Room, hallway, stairs, each compartment presented head-on and complete.
Payoff: The shot admits that it is a shot, so you end up reading the family the way you read a page. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). A frame that declares itself as a chosen, shut-in group of things is what the reading calls the closed set.
Look at the maps, letters and badges filling the frame. (setting)
Hand-lettering, invented field manuals, Khaki Scout regalia, merit badges, a suitcase of library books. Anderson manufactures the customs that make these objects mean anything at all.
Payoff: By the second reel a length of rope or a badge lands as evidence, running on habits the film built itself. In the reading: mark. An object that means through a customary chain, here a custom the film invented, is what the reading calls a mark.
Listen to the Britten record playing in the opening scene. (sound)
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra takes an ensemble apart and names each section in turn. The camera is doing the same thing to the Bishops. Alexandre Desplat's cues pick the idea up later.
Payoff: The record states the film's method out loud, so the structure is handed to you in the first few minutes.
Watch the khaki, ochre and faded red across every scene. (light)
Super 16mm grain and a tight period palette give the island a late-summer warmth. Nothing in it is cold. The color belongs to remembering a September rather than to any actual one.
Payoff: The warmth is applied evenly, so the entire film sits inside a single remembered season.
Watch the children play it straight while the adults deflate. (performance)
Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward deliver with grave conviction. Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand play worn-out competence. The comedy lives in the mismatch.
Payoff: The film takes a twelve-year-old's feelings more seriously than any adult relationship in it, and the playing is how it does that.
Once you have seen it
Watch the storm arrive exactly when the narrator said it would. (structure)
Bob Balaban reports weather and geography from inside the frame, then the picture runs a countdown. The separate chase lines tighten and converge at the last possible minute.
Payoff: The film runs the oldest convergent chase structure in movies with total sincerity, inside a dollhouse.
Watch the church performance of Noye's Fludde. (structure)
Sam sees Suzy in a raven costume, singing about a flood. The opera happens before the weather does, and Anderson has said the film was built outward from that music.
Payoff: A performance inside the film predicts the film, so a small staged thing grows into the world around it. In the reading: crystal-image: the seed. A small crystallizing point from which a whole world takes shape is what the reading calls the seed of the crystal.
Watch a joke land flat and then stay on a face. (performance)
Andrew Weisblum cuts the comedy to a metronome, then holds past the beat until real hurt surfaces on one of the children. The stillness does what the dialogue will not.
Payoff: A flat delivery makes the held face carry everything, so the smallest change in it registers as a lot.
Look at how small the adults are kept. (staging)
A lonely sheriff, a wounded scoutmaster, two estranged parents, a woman reduced to her job title. Anderson keeps them inside their compartments while the children keep leaving theirs.
Payoff: The blocking sorts who still has intensity from who gave it up, and the children are the ones who move.
Carry this in: Read the frame like a page. Anderson takes the front wall off and labels what is inside.