Moonrise Kingdom

Why did she do it? Was she scared? Was she bored?

(Belle and Sebastian)

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I love Wes Anderson: the neo-Nouvelle Vague swagger, the precocious children, the middle-age ennui, the arch dialogue, the symmetrical compositions, the literary conceits (diaries, letters, books, chapter headings, narrators...). His debut Bottle Rocket (1996), now a cult classic, is a Salingerian tour-de-force, an off-kilter caper film with lovely breakthrough performances from the Wilson brothers and a superb, self-effacing cameo from James Caan. Rushmore (1998) is sadder, spikier and more ambitious, and one of the great American films about adolescence. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is Anderson's most complete work, a peculiar, ink-black ensemble tragicomedy of exceptional depth and verve. I wasn't sure about the following two, The Life Aquatic (2004) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007), but he returned to form with Fantastic Mr Fox (2009), a retro, sophisticated, anarchic delight.

His latest offering Moonrise Kingdom, which opened this year's Cannes Film Festival, is an artful, delicate, subtly poignant piece and visually his most impressive film so far. The year is 1965 and we are on a small island where scouting, self-pity and Benjamin Britten seem to be all the rage: it also rains very hard. During a (remarkably elaborate) local production of Britten's opera Noye’s Fludde, young scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) leaves the church auditorium and finds himself in a girls-only dressing room. 'What type of bird are you?', he asks the one in the middle. 'A raven', quoths the troubled Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). Immediate Andersonian Kindred Spirits, they correspond and hatch a plan to run away, Sam from his scout platoon at Camp Ivanhoe, Suzy from the family that don't understand her. Local police officer Bruce Willis leads the hunt, supported by Ed Norton's sensitive scout master, all the little scout cubs (or whatever they're called) and Suzy's weary lawyer parents, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand.

At times, it seems a bit weird to have two twelve-year-old lovers as main characters for a film, behaving as though they're in their own mini-version of Badlands; the scene where Sam paints Suzy in just her bra and knickers is particularly borderline. But Anderson just about gets away with it, as Eric Rohmer got away with the little girl's holiday romance in Pauline at the Beach, because of the summery innocence and genuine empathy that underpin the snogs and fumbles. It's also less an affair than an adventure, in which Sam's diurnal boy-scout pragmatism and Suzy's bedtime reading dovetail rather well.

Indeed, as ever, Anderson celebrates the eccentrically imaginative, and the film itself has the hand-crafted charm of the community performance of the Britten opera. As Ed Norton observes in a rather fun interview on the Guardian website, characters put on plays throughout Wes Anderson's work and they often go unappreciated, like Max's brilliantly over-the-top productions in Rushmore and Margot Tenenbaum's play that her father Royal claims 'didn't seem believable to me'. The sympathy for the outsider is allied to a wariness of conformity and the cocksure, evidenced in the Teddy Boys at Sam's foster home and the ‘Lord of the Flies’-aggression of the cubs in the woods when they find the fugitives (led by an Aryan, Ralph-like figure on a motorbike who, to his great credit, has an epiphany later in the film and persuades the other boys that Sam needs their help). Harvey Keitel's bullying old-boy scout patriarch, who humiliates Ed Norton in front of a huge crowd, is the adult extrapolation of this easy, unthinking, macho bastardry, so it is rather a satisfying, graceful riposte, immediately afterwards, when Norton rescues Keitel from his burning cabin by carrying him on his back, like an ironic Anchises.

The film is full of lovely performances and Anderson's direction of the child actors is commendably understated, but the two stand-outs are Bruce Willis and Ed Norton, both sweet, solitary, beta-heroes who buck the trend. There is a particularly touching scene where Ed Norton stops halfway through a recording of his dictaphone-diary, is hit by a sort of existential crisis, and stays silent for about five seconds. Anderson has a real knack for these miniature moments of overwhelming pathos. There's a scene in Fantastic Mr Fox where the young fox Kristofferson, whose father is very ill, is made to sleep on the floor by his resentful cousin Ash. It's the last straw, and he starts to cry. Again, it's only for about five seconds, then we're onto the next scene (see also pretty much any scene with Bill Murray in Rushmore). Some dismiss Anderson as mannered and superficial, but I can't think of a director who can produce pearls of sadness in the everyday as purely and effectively as he can.

The film also has a visual brio that surpasses even Anderson's best work, and two scenes are especially impressive. A midnight canoe expedition uses natural light in a way I haven't seen since the likes of Barry Lyndon and early Terrence Malick. Then, for the film's climax, a rescue sequence on top of a church is a maelstrom of moonlit rain, shadow and indigo, the cinematic equivalent of the astonishing storm-in-the-forest chapter of Nabokov's Pale Fire ('A flash of lightning, a handshake...'). It also provides an ingenious, cockle-warming solution to Sam's predicament (which I won’t spoil).

Moonshine Kingdom has its flaws. There is a lull about halfway through, a little too long is spent on Sam and Suzie's meanderings, and some of the cameos work better than others (regular Anderson collaborator Jason Schwartzman is a joy; Keitel and Swinton slightly less so). But the third act of the film is glorious and, for a stylised 'auteur' like Anderson, transposes unusually complicated, naturalistic exchanges within credible relationships (the scene when Bill Murray and Frances McDormand are in their adjacent single beds, for instance).

I sometimes think of Wes Anderson as the Belle and Sebastian of cinema, inasmuch as the quirky, cosy, crisp conveyance often covers up something a bit darker: the loneliness of the playground, the melodrama of puberty, the wry hyper-maturity of the outcast. Moonrise Kingdom, perhaps better than any of Anderson's work so far, captures the difficulty of family, the importance of companionship, and the cathartic moment children realise adults aren't perfect. A strange, tender, hopeful triumph.