Moonrise Kingdom's tales of quirky childhood fiction

WES Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is a quirky tale that recalls the great child figures of literature and puts them in the almost-present.

Moonrise Kingdom

WES Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (Universal, PG) is an agreeably quirky tale that recalls the great child figures of literature - Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, Pippi Longstocking - and puts them in the almost-present (actually it's 1965) on the fictional island of New Penzance, notionally somewhere off the New England coastline.

Being a Wes Anderson film, it has Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman in it, who are both excellent; but significantly, it also features Ed Norton, Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban. So you've got a slab of Hollywood A-list right there, performing in a wonderful ensemble piece whose story is actually driven by the children around them, most notably screen newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward.

They're Sam and Suzy, two 12-year-olds who fall in love and run away, prompting an island-wide (and beyond) search. Sam, who's an orphan in foster care, has absconded from his summer boy scout camp, and scoutmaster Ward (Norton), a bumbling but well-meaning leader who's a maths teacher in real life, initiates the search party. Suzy, with whom Sam has been in passionate written communication since they met the previous summer, takes off from the family home, called Summer's End, where she lives a silently resentful existence with three siblings and their lawyer parents Walt (Murray) and Laura (McDormand).

Willis is the police chief, and the possessor of the island's only car; he's also having a romantic affair with Laura. Swinton makes a brittle appearance as the enigmatically named Social Services, sent to the island to deal with the fact Sam's foster parents don't want him back, and Balaban pops up regularly as a mostly non-diegetic narrator figure, although at one point he also enters the drama to point out to the other players that he in fact examined Sam for his cartography scout's badge. Keitel is the senior scoutmaster, who gives Norton a roasting for losing the boy and then has to be rescued by Norton during a storm.

So it's all quite joyfully eccentric, a feature amplified by the deliberately naive style of the children's acting. Indeed, their performances can distract attention from the fact that among the adult cast are some of the finest character actors of their generation. Anderson's genius is to focus all the elements of childhood resentment, angst and uncertainty that we know so well from the aforementioned world of books into these two 12-year-olds and the kids around them. The adults are emotionally cast adrift and at times unhappy, but they're all essentially good people (well, perhaps apart from Swinton's Social Services, who is both hilarious and unsettling and a deliberate poke at the inadequacies of the welfare system).

Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola have created an idiosyncratic world that revels in the absurd while it engages with the traumas of children on the cusp of adulthood. We are watching maladjustment transfer itself across the generations. And yet there is nothing sneering or miserable about its proposition that being an outsider is not incompatible with being good-hearted and generous. Indeed, Anderson is suggesting, that might be the preferable state of affairs.