I thought about weddings. What does it mean to wed yourself to someone or something? I thought about meeting someone and never wanting to leave them until you die. To feel so compelled that you want to weld yourself to them. I’ve always conflated the words wed and weld, but really what’s the difference? Whether it be a book or a person or a place or a thing, what is that quality that makes us abandon the rest of the options and choose this thing to be our resting place, the thing that owns a piece of our hearts?

Weeks later, after my friends had exchanged rings, and other smaller insects or a hotel maid had removed the roach, and the bikers had drifted off to another motel party, and the pizza delivery guy was counting and sorting his ones, I was in the dark watching Terrence Malick’s new film To The Wonder, thinking it was a thing I could wed myself to. It was a matinee in San Francisco, and I was one of only three people in the theater. I chose a seat far away from them, because I knew this was Malick, and Malick makes me cry.

The film opens with camcorder footage of two people’s love, and a woman’s voice begins narrating. “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night. A spark. You got me out of the darkness. You gathered me up from earth. You’ve brought me back to life.” The part-Biblical, part-half-as-good-Rumi narration continues, and its elevated spiritual reach combines with Malick’s hallmark swaying camera. That camera, commanded by the great Emmanuel Lubezki, creates a dull seasickness in some, and a swelling of emotion in others (me).

The story of To The Wonder is fairly bare-bones. With almost no dialogue, it’s a love story about a couple played by the painfully beautiful Olga Kurylenko and the painfully stoic Ben Affleck. She’s a single mother living in Paris with her daughter, and they move to America (Oklahoma) to be with Affleck. The stark contrast between the European scenes and the American ones pits the Old World against the New World as Malick has done in his other films.

The couple fall in and out of love over and over, like the rest of us. Affleck’s character is noncommittal, while Kurylenko twirls through the film, searching for her freedom. The real meat of the story is in the surprising character of Javier Bardem as a lost and conflicted priest in the Oklahoma town.

Profoundly joyless and searching, he wonders where God has gone. “Everywhere you are present. Still I can’t see you…I have no experience of you.” Bardem’s character continues seeking God, finally finding some solace and meaning in treating the downtrodden. But still he searches, much like Malick himself.

These characters aren’t characters; they’re meant to be archetypes. Stripped of almost all their dialogue, and left only to wander and wonder, they become stand-ins for us. There’s not much more to say about what “happens” in the film, because it’s about the spaces in between, about the rapturous filming of light and the moments we can’t capture through speech and action.

Between Malick’s last film (Tree of Life) and To The Wonder, one has to note the heavy-handed spiritual direction of his films. He’s ramping up his production, from one every twenty years, to one every two, and he’s getting older. By this point, Malick’s style of folding in multiple dancing-in-the-grain shots with sparkling light of the magic hour has become a joke among many critics and filmgoers. People poked fun when he rolled out the dinosaurs in Tree of Life. But what were they really laughing at?

I suppose they’re laughing at the purported cheesiness of his expression. Take the following bit of narration from To The Wonder: “What is this love that loves us? That comes from nowhere. From all around. The sky. You, cloud. You love me too.”

For some, it’s laughable; for others, it’s moving. It takes a certain kind of bravery to be so sincere as to verge on—then fall headfirst into—cheesiness, something critics never dare to do. From the comfortable point of watching art, it is easy to laugh, but who among us has not been moved by the ineffable? Has not seen a cloud and exchanged love with it?

In A. O. Scott’s review (which I enjoyed), he mocks Kurylenko’s incessant twirling: “…the twirling ladies look more commercial than cosmic, as if plucked from advertisements for perfume, high-thread-count sheets or other luxury goods.” He’s right. These supermodelesque actors do verge on the cliches of advertising. But he’s also wrong, because advertising imagery panders to and reflects our highest ideals: that elusive, spiritual, field-twirling joy. Malick’s women are not pandering to those ideals, but rather embodying them, twirling to a different tune, a music brought in on the wind by the gods. Who would mock a whirling dervish? Ultimately, Scott finds To The Wonder a “noble and sincere” effort but also a failure of sorts, writing, “…the fine intentions of To the Wonder pave a road to puzzlement, not awe.” But what is the difference between the two besides the semantic? Is not awe a state of bafflement?

Both atheists and believers alike acknowledge the coexistence of faith and doubt. Both groups understand that grace and magic flicker in and out. How do those of faith reconcile believing in a God who seemingly comes and goes? To whom do nonbelievers ascribe this magic all around, tucked into unexpected corners of life?

Malick seems to be interested in what is outside and underneath and around the framework of our lives. He’s not interested in the stories we tell as much as the moments that cause us to throw our hands up into the air. What large thing is hiding inside the tiny narrative of “born, fall in love, die”? All around us, the world is permeated with possibility and profound gestures of grace and surprise. How do we integrate that magnitude into the tiny story of our lives?

Is it even possible to make a film or novel of artwork that captures all of life? Ask almost any artist, and they’ll tell you they never told the story they wanted to tell. Do we ever fully tell our story, or are we always reaching? In Tree of Life, Malick was trying to do it all, and the failures and successes of that film reveal one thing: his admirable reach. Malick has been trying to tell this story his whole life, and he seems to be getting closer and closer.

I almost never read reviews before I write them, but I’ve heard that almost everyone panned To The Wonder, both critics and filmgoers alike, which made me feel crestfallen and alone. What was I seeing that they were not? Then I remembered that beauty strikes us in different ways at different times. Certain films I loathe I often rewatch in moments when my heart’s a bit more open, and I see them radically differently. Perhaps one has to be prone to a state of wonder when watching Malick’s films.

In the end, it’s the ineffable that seems to move us so. Maybe we’re so intrigued by death because we don’t know what it is. Why is it that we can fall in and out of love and back in again? We have moments of inexplicable synchronicity. Mystery. Miracles abound. And we can never understand them. We are rendered wondrous.

To the Wonder is an ode to that wonder. It’s a film for people who will never tire of watching blades of grass wave against the sun. It’s for those of us who doubt and still strive to have faith in something. It’s for those of us who might still believe in a truth. It’s for those of us who lie in beds in motel rooms on the sides of highways, wondering what it means to want to wed yourself, to weld yourself to something beautiful, forever.

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The opening montage of this romp is filled with budding tatas, American-colored popsicles-as-dicks, and girls who don’t look old enough to drive doing bong rips. But what looks right out of MTV’s Spring Break quickly devolves into a nightmarish echo of capitalist culture.

It’s no surprise, and quite a delightful choice, that Disney’s darlings are culled to play demon teenage girls who cruise through the film in bikinis and ski masks, holding up people at first with squirt guns and moving quickly along to blasting people to death Natural Born Killers style. While the obvious subversion of casting Disney stars as soulless gun-toters could have fallen flat, it was repeatedly met with delight.

The trailer for the film prepared me for what I anticipated to be a whole truckload of misogyny. It’s clear that only in a male fantasy would college girls spend their time in class drawing hearts that say ‘I love penis’ inside of them, drink out of squirt guns, and do handstands in their underwear. But suprisingly, just when the audience is positioned in an exploitative stance as we watch the four teenage girls in bikinis shotgunning weed and stroking each other’s hair in a faux-lesbionic fashion, Korine turns the trope on his head, making the four youngsters base and nihilistic. These aren’t girls gone wild, they’re girls gone wrong. They seem to care about nothing (save for Selena Gomez who turns in the only emotional performance of the film as a born-again Christian roped in with the wrong crowd), and proceed to blindly rob, steal and kill anything in sight.

After holding up a chicken shack, wearing short shorts and powder blue hoodies, they have enough money to go to Florida for spring break, where they meet a gangster rapper named Alien, played with panache and eerie conviction by James Franco. Franco sips through his silver grill, and his corn rows shake around like a wild lawn sprinkler as he ushers the girls into the world of St. Petersburg, Florida.

He takes the girls round in his Camaro (license plate BALLR), and introduces them to his life of hustling, though to his surprise they seem to need no introduction. In a gripping scene two of the girls turn the gun on him, and make him fellate his own hardware. There’s also a very Korine-esque scene where Franco’s character Alien plays Britney Spears’ “Everytime” on a white grand piano situated on the deck of his pool, while the girls stand around holding machine guns, wearing pink ski masks and sweat pants that say DTF (down to fuck), even though the girls in this film have very little fucking on their minds. And that brings us a central problem with Spring Breakers: the protagonists of the film seem to have no real desire. Can you have characters without desire? The lineage of art seems to say no, though Korine seems to be asserting that desirelessness is our cultural inheritance.

When Alien says, “Big booties and money is what life’s all about”, for a second I had to reconsider what life is all about. Had I gotten it wrong this whole time? Was my belief that life is about truth and beauty just a dreamer’s fantasy? Have I become un-American?

If nothing else, Spring Breakers seems to be just another way of saying what we’ve known for a long time: consumerism is eating us alive. In fact, our real desires have been wholly replaced by manufactured ones. The girls in the film, when presented with buckets of cash, reply, “Seeing all this money makes my tits look bigger.” And the insidiousness of subliminal advertising plays a role via Alien’s repetition of the phrase “spring break” which he whispers over and over throughout the film, even when he’s not on screen, like a narrative mantra lulling us into a capitalist-induced coma.

It’s this base need to be a cog in the money-making machine that is the nexus of Spring Breakers message, if there is one. The girls tell each other affirmations in the form of, “just pretend like you’re in a video game” and “act like you’re in a movie or something” – could not those phrases be instructive for anyone dealing with modern life?

When one of the girls hesitates, the others get firm and say, “you have to be hard”. Welcome to the new economy ladies! There seems to be no time to develop ethics when struggling to get by financially. How do you get to Florida for spring break and eventually pay for your student loans? By dealing drugs and robbing people (duh!). It’s not a sad statement of where we’re at; it’s a damning one.

And aside from all that, the there’s the issue of race. The one time we see the girls in school, the topic at hand is the civil rights movement, but instead of paying attention to Emmett Till on the screen, they’re busy doodling testicles in their notebooks. While many students went south in support of equal rights for African Americans during the civil rights movement, the young stars of Spring Breakers return South to rob and then eventually kill a party full of black men. That’s quite a portrait of how little we’ve come, if we’ve come anywhere at all.

The film’s characters of color only exist on screen to remind us just how much white culture has stolen from them. The character of Alien, faux-rapper, middling gangster, is meant to be an apex of appropriation. The fact that Franco’s character learns everything he knows from fellow Black ganster Archie (played by Gucci Mane), and then has him killed is an obvious metaphor for white suburban consumption of hip hop culture. Additionally, to have two white girls in bikinis blow up an entire party of Archie’s crew, without suffering one scratch, seems gratuitous and sick, though that seems to be the film’s point. While Korine doesn’t seem to have the intellectual chops to fully deal with the issue of race, his film at least nods to the fact that he’s aware. Every artist has their limitations and Spring Breakers is more reflection of racial tension than analysis.

In the end Spring Breakers is much like having sex with a praying mantis—an experience that seduces at first then spits you out headless, and thus brainless. Which is not to say that the film is dumb, but rather that it’s mind-numbing. It’s a testament to the fact that we’re easily seduced by bright lights and hypnotic base lines. The film’s success can largely be attributed to the flashy neon cinematography courtesy of Benoît Debie and the trance-like editing of Douglas Crise. Throughout the film I was repeatedly reminded of the pulp-nod of Drive, so it came as no surprise to learn that the video-pumped soundtrack was created by Cliff Martinez (who scored Drive) and Skrillex.

Korine is nearing 40, (how long can you be referred to as an enfant terrible?) and I suspect Spring Breakers is more likely to appeal to aging film critics, middle-aged men, and women who never got a spring break (see:me) than the completely non-existent demographic of 18-year-old nihilist girls in neon bikinis. If that demographic actually existed, we’d all be doomed. Let’s be grateful, this once, for the pulp and fantasy, but not forget that the reflection comes right from the other end of the looking glass.

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The plot: In 1993, a 13-year old boy named Nicholas Barclay vanishes from his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, never to be seen again. That’s until “he” turns up four years later, discovered by the police, crouched in a phone booth in Spain, prompting them to take him to a foster home. The “boy” they found in the phone booth was actually a 23-year-old man, Frenchman Frédéric Bourdin to be exact, who had spent most of his life pursuing an odd path of crime, impersonating missing children, ostensibly because he wanted to find the love that had been missing from his own childhood.

Once in the foster home, Bourdin agrees to call his parents if the foster home will just give him 24 hours alone in the office. While in the office, he calls the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, asks if anyone matching the description of himself went missing about four years ago, and they fax him an image of Nicholas Barclay. Bourdin, in a moment of panic or inspiration, decides to assume the identity of the missing Barclay, despite the fact that he looks nothing like the missing boy. He dyes his hair blonde, gets tattoos that Barclay had, and hopes for the best. And so begins the insane tale that is the pivot point around which The Imposter spins. Barclay’s family from Texas reunites with him, and Bourdin, posing as Barclay, moves in with them in San Antonio and resumes, or pretends to resume a “normal” life with them.

I’m giving away the plot, because as they say, the devil’s in the details.

The devil in this case appears to be Frédéric Bourdin, master psychopath, whose career was lengthily profiled in David Gann’s New Yorker piece, a man whose acts like a chameleon (his nickname), oscillating between pandering to your emotional compass (he only wants to find a family and to be loved), and appearing utterly creepy and devoid of emotion (there is no clear telling what he’s really up to).

While the film doesn’t delve much into Bourdin’s childhood history (an investigation that might shed light into his particularly curious form of pathological deception), it does start to dig at the Barclay family. The mother of the missing boy, presides over the film like a ghost, showing almost no sign whatsoever of any emotion. There are other members of the family lurking around, but as the film progresses, something is clearly not right with the Barclays.

It’s apparent to any filmgoer that Bourdin looks nothing like the missing San Antonio boy. First off, he’s got a French accent that does not disappear once in the States. Secondly he’s got brown hair (not blond), brown eyes (not blue), and a significant five-o-clock shadow. So the more intriguing question becomes the investigation into the psychology of the Barclay family – why would a family take in a stranger who clearly is not their son? Do they really believe that it is him? Do they want to believe? Or, are they pretending to believe in order to hide something else?

The more nefarious suggestion arises, even from Bourdin himself, that the Barclay family knows very well that he is not Nicholas, but they are pretending to in order to cover up the more disturbing truth that they know what happened to their son.

There’s the personal truths (see: delusions) that the players of this tale cling to, but there’s also someone in the film who thankfully goes for the old-fashioned definition of truth. The film’s watery layers get a fresh look when San Antonio private eye, Charlie Parker, steps onto the scene with his rotund belly and suspenders. He’s not that into all the nuance of the situation; the man just wants to set the record straight. Parker starts off by outing Bourdin as a fraud, using a technique where he compares his ears with photographs of Barclay. Apparently ears are the best way to distinguish people from one another (who knew?) Then, believing that the Barclay family knows what happened to Nicholas, Parker takes up a shovel (literally) and begins hunting for Nicholas Barclay’s body, which he believes is buried somewhere in San Antonio. As he begins the murder investigation, his first suspect, Nicholas’ older brother, overdoses. There’s nothing like a San Antonio private eye scooping the FBI, but more importantly, he adds a layer of common sense to this unbelievable tale of deception.

The Imposter is as thrilling as any action film (I was reduced to many open-mouthed omg’s and wtf’s), employing proficient narrative pizazz and technical flourishes. Yet at times its over-the-top made-for-TV style often felt as though it was part of the grand tale of deceit it was portraying.

In the end, The Imposter managed to portray a complex story, but did little in the way of probing the question that seems to be at the heart of this story: What lengths will we go to in order to be loved? Murder? Lies? Impersonating missing children?

The film is also a solid affirmation of the Didion quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Without the story that he is a missing child, what then might Bourdin do? For a moment Bourdin, knowing well he was not Nicholas Barclay, had to believe the lie he concocted. In order to “be loved” he had to “be Barclay”, and in order for the Barclay family to believe their own tale (the truth of that one is much murkier), they too had to believe the story. If everyone goes in on the lie, where does the truth really reside?

We all go to desperate lengths to be loved, to believe what we want to. While most of us don’t impersonate missing children in order to find a home, who among us cannot relate to the desire for one? Additionally, we all tell ourselves small lies (most of us steer clear of ones that pique the interest of Interpol), in order to piece together a story we can live with. None of our stories have the brand of truth that detective Charlier Parker would vouch for, but as we all know reality, it turns out, is pretty f’n malleable. Who knows what crazy story we’ll believe next.

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The skillfully understated Reichardt joins up again with screenwriter Jon Raymond (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy) to give us Meek’s Cutoff – a portrait of the Oregon Trail as both a place and an idea, back when the west was an uncharted strange land off in the distance, waiting to be found.

Meek’s opens with a group of settlers crossing a river. An early image: one of the women is chest-deep in the water holding up a bird cage with a yellow canary inside. The canary shines like a golden coin against the washed-out landscape as a symbol of hope, colonial dreams, and the persisting conflict between freedom and captivity. A wild creature inside a cage. This initial image portends almost all of what’s to come.

Based on the diaries of real women on the Oregon Trail, Meek’s takes place in 1845, and it follows three families of settlers who have separated from a larger group deciding to follow a guide named Stephen Meek, who becomes less and less credible as the movie progresses, stranding the travelers in a wilderness unknown. Along the way, water is running out, and they come upon a lone Cayuse Indian (Ron Rondeaux) who they capture; instead of killing him, they try to use him to help guide them to water and hopefully towards their destination. But the Indian only speaks Nez Perce, and is more than indifferent to their quest; he seems glad to let them perish.

The pressurized situation of being stranded and running out of water reveals the characters’ personalities as they’re pushed to their physical and psychological limits. They lose a wagon, and remember that canary from the opening scene? The beacon of hope? Well a swift shot of an empty bird cage swinging from the back of a wagon lets you know that there’s nothing to chirp about any more.

The settlers’ last hope seems to be the Cayuse Indian, and the only character who reaches out to him (its unclear if her motivations are purely altruistic, conniving, or a healthy blend of both) is a young wife named Emily Tetherow played with measure by Michelle Williams. Williams totally gets Reichardt’s vision, and portrays the character of Emily with such unsentimentality, you couldn’t shed a tear if you tried. If you don’t get out to the movies much, here’s a tip: just go see whatever Michelle Williams is in.

To add to the film’s inherent anxiety, Reichardt chose to shoot the film in the tight 4:3 Academy ratio, instead of wide-screen, directing the viewer into the moment at hand. This forces us to see the wide-open plain as a trap. Which is not to say the film isn’t visually beautiful; cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt manages to bring light to this barren land, and often times the portraits of the three women in their dailyness, gathering sticks, walking across the plain, feel like Andrew Wyeth paintings come to life.

Meek’s may have all the dressings of a western: guns, horses, wagons, but this isn’t what you expect from a Western. What kind of Western sheds no blood? What kind of Western focuses almost exclusively on female characters? What kind of Western seems almost wedded to tedium?

The term “revisionist western” applies to films that take the optimism and foolhardiness of a traditional western and subvert them with historical underpinnings. Reichardt goes the extra step of stripping the genre down to its knickers. “Going West” has often been glamorized as something filled with hope and drama, but what was it really like, physically and psychologically?  What complicated interior dilemmas did that journey actually encompass?

This is also a feminist film that eschews male authority in general; the notion that men have it under control and can be in charge of all major decision-making is completely turned upside down during the course of the film’s events. The character with the most mettle turns out to be Emily. She’s the only one who shoots a gun. While everyone else falls apart or proves incompetent, she retains her reserve and cleverness throughout the film.

Now, we should get to the whole “boring” part (notice the italics and quotes).  There’s was a flurry surrounding just how boring Meek’s Cutoff is when it came out. From Dan Kois’ “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables” to Mahnola Dargis and A.O. Scott’s “In Defense of the Slow and Boring”, the idea of a film’s ultimate purpose arises. I suppose it’s true that very little happens in Meek’s Cutoff, but that’s only if you need every second of every frame to be filled with noise, visual or otherwise. Not only does Reichardt have a preternatural ability to stretch every moment far past its breaking point, she also seems to hesitate using language, motion, plot, and anything else that might get in the way of open contemplation. When people describe Meek’s as boring – what they really seem to be saying is that it makes them have to personally bear so much silence. Meek’s is slow and unfilled because it’s attempting to question the actual experience of history instead of answering it. What was it like to set out in a world completely unknown? To follow nothing more than a promise? To embody the idea of blind faith?

In the end, it turns out that the cutoff in Meek’s Cutoff has less to do with the breaking point of the settlers and more to do with that of contemporary movie-going audiences. After exiting the theatre where I watched Meek’s, a man outside flagged me down seeking confirmation, “There wasn’t enough action, right? RIGHT!?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him the answer he wasn’t looking for, “Maybe there wasn’t supposed to be.”

But what he said points to a truth – Reichardt’s films are directly addressed at our abilities to watch films. Movies tend to shy away from monotony. They seem almost desperate to please you. Not this one. Instead of speeding things up, Reichardt amplifies the chore-like living of this quest. Her goal seems to be to inhabit the realness of life – the mundane, the uncomfortable, the daily. To ask us: Could a film open us up to our world before we were here?

Meek’s is a Western we’ve never seen before. It’s a mystery, a lyric documentary, and here the references to Malick seem apt. While they are distinctly different filmmakers, this movie is clearly reminiscent of Malick’s The New World in that it explores similar territory: the world before we knew it.

Because compared to the world of 1845, our world is so known. To watch the settlers labor towards a new destiny without any previous knowledge, compass, or map, every sight new and full of threat, opens us to the vast, complex mystery that is history. There’s something thrilling about watching Reichardt take the glamour and idealism of the classic western and bring it to its aching knees. We all know that the journey was rough and unpleasant, even though we don’t access that knowledge regularly. The local PDX coffee shop where people laze about with their latte was probably once a spot where settlers died of dehydration. And because we are so tuned out, and our lives are so comparatively easy now, those bleak and brave 1845 days have been revived in the most beautiful boredom, for us to endure.

After all, they endured it for us.

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Moonrise opens with a Zissou-dressed narrator (apparently the beanie never dies) who outlines the basic topography of the island and tells us that in three days, a storm is coming, and so we wait and watch to see what will be carried in on the wind. This is a story about two lonely children and the end of summer is a perfect choice, because what for youth is sadder than the end of summer? We know that children cling to summer’s long hours, but we also know that the storm (adulthood) is inevitable. Time always tells. Longtime Anderson collaborator Robert Yeoman adds to this pull between preserving youth while acquiescing to age, by giving the film an Instagrammed quality; faded daisy-center yellow permeates the landscape, and there’s a washed-out quality to everything as if we’re looking back at life through a haze. This purposeful aesthetic choice is meant to induce nostalgia, as if we can only look at the traumas of childhood if we are slightly anesthetized.

Many of Anderson’s films feature men revolving around one complicated woman and Moonrise is no exception. The film’s young male protagonist is Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), an orphan who escapes from his Khaki Scout camp in order to be reunited with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), a girl he met once backstage at a school play and has been courting through letters (rendered in a lovely epistolary montage) ever since. The two “lovers” (what horrible adult part of me just put that in quotes?) run away and meet in a field, she dressed in saddle shoes and knee-highs, toting her Francoise Hardy records and a kitten, he smoking a corncob pipe. He’s a pre-Max Fischer type, she’s a pre-Margot Tenenbaum, and Anderson lets us know that their whole future depends on this particular chapter of their lives as children. They set off on their escape, loaded with an endless supply of quirks (lefty scissors?!), and while their emotional baggage is more than they can bear, at least they have each other.

One of Suzy’s trademarks (and a classic Anderson detail) is the pair of binoculars she always wears around her neck; there’s a reason Suzy Bishop is constantly looking at the world through these limited lenses – it’s because she can’t handle the big picture: a panoramic display of pathetic adults.

We have Suzy Bishop’s parents, the Bishops, a married set of lawyers (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) who sleep in twin beds and refer to each other by their professional titles. Murray sleeps and drinks through the film (and his acting), while McDormand is magnetic as usual but underutilized as Mrs. Bishop. She’s having an affair with the island’s cop, Captain Sharp, played by Bruce Willis who delivers one of the gentlest performances of his career. Rounding out the cast of adults in pursuit is Khaki Scout Master Ward (Ed Norton), naïve but earnest, and in the end just as lonely as the rest.

These are the adults Suzy and Sam have to look up to (up may not be the right direction), and this is the central problem. Anderson’s portraits of adults are really just portraits of unresolved childhood traumas; he seems to be asserting that we are our childhoods. When Suzy and Sam run away, they’re running from what they assume are the inevitable realities of adulthood, escaping into an idealized world of childhood acceptance and honesty (my actual childhood memories are a little different from that).

Where Mr. and Mrs. Bishop have learned to cope with each other’s faults and failings—one through infidelity, the other through alcohol and disconnection—the children are actually enamored with the other’s flaws, even taking delight and refuge in their psychological peccadilloes. For Suzy, Sam is the first person, and as far as we know the only person, who not only understands her dark moods and violent temper (those lefty scissors make a handy weapon), but seems drawn to them as well.

The film feels personal, perhaps more so than any of Anderson’s other work; when the credits rolled it came as no surprise that the film is dedicated to his girlfriend, as it’s definitely the sweetest, most direct love letter he’s penned to date.

In many ways, Moonrise is a testimony not only to how to love but how to live artistically. Sam and Suzy just want to play records and love one another and seek adventure in their own way. Sounds reasonable right? Suzy likes to read books and Sam likes to paint watercolors. When Suzy questions Sam about what a poem is, he assures her, “Poems don’t always have to rhyme, you know. They’re just supposed to be creative.”

Some people have taken issue with Anderson’s work (it seems everyone is conflicted about loving his films), expressing a frustration with his aesthetic obsessions and his ability to shirk substance. They seem to want his work to transcend its quirky formalism. Sure many of his films have problematic underpinnings: an unexamined relationship to colonialism, a propensity for fetishizing the working class, and an almost pathological insistence that women are crazy. But aside from that, people adore his oeuvre, and it’s easy to see why. On top of the formalistic amuse bouches in every frame, and the long dolly shots that make you feel as though you’re wheeling through life, Anderson’s films have a poignant center about what it’s like to preserve the wonder of childhood in the midst of grueling adult realities.

Even if you thought you couldn’t bear any more of his trust-fund antics, there’s still much to admire and enjoy in Moonrise, an elementary film so slight and sweet it seems as if he made it in an afternoon. If you’re looking for a great leap forward though, Moonrise won’t scratch that itch. I will say this: to those who argue that Anderson refuses to grow up – based on his portrayal of adult life, can you really blame him?

When it comes to Anderson, this time around I feel like taking an extra tender response to his extra tender film. It’s as if he’s set himself up for less scrutiny than usual because he’s made a film about the heartbreak of childhood. Who could take too much issue with that? As Scout Master Ward says to the Khaki Scouts searching for the runaway orphan, “Your mission is to find him, not to hurt him.” Good advice for those exploring a gifted filmmaker’s labor of love.

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