Nothing Was Delivered

**Moonrise Kingdom Spoilers**

Wes Anderson films all center around childhood. Sometimes we adults dealing with the fallout of growing up. Sometimes we see the parents who struggle to accept how they raised their children. The transition from kid to grown up is always painful and awkward. There is always a basic lack of empathy separating one generation from the next, and it ends up damaging everyone involved. 

Moonrise Kingdom is interesting because we’re not coming in years after the fact. There’s still hope for these kids. Sam and Suzy have been having a hard time of it lately, but now that they’ve found each other, maybe they’re not fated to wandering the earth as miserable as the characters from The Darjeeling Limited. 

The unspoken truth of adolescence is that most of us have to struggle through it alone. There’s a gulf between you and everyone around you because you’re too hopped up on hormones to articulate you’re feelings. The frustration of youth is knowing exactly what you want but not being able to explain it. 

Wes Anderson drops us in to the lives of these characters at a point where they still haven’t settled. They strongly know the kind of life they want, and somehow stumbled upon one of the few other people in the world who feels the same way. They can’t really talk about it, but that’s okay, because each of them already knows what the other one wants. It’s an immediate bond, and one that the the adults in the film don’t understand because they’ve never had anyone else know what they want. 

Desire is problematic. Fitting your life into a vague sense of place is difficult, so you compromise. You cut corners. Eventually you wake up one day and find yourself in a Talking Heads song. Sam and Suzy have found the best lifeline you could ask for in surviving growing up. They found a partner.