Melody and Moonrise Kingdom

Yesterday I discussed the influence of the 1970s children’s-fiction canon on the work of moviemaker Wes Anderson. For his latest, Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson told Entertainment Weekly that he also took inspiration from certain films of that decade.

François Truffaut’s Small Change (L’argent de poche, 1976), Anderson said, was “really one of the inspirations for this movie, because it’s what made me start thinking about doing…[a] pre-teenage romance.” Among the many vignettes making up that movie is one about a young girl and boy falling in puppy love, sharing a first kiss, and then trying to sneak back into a school or camp assembly unnoticed.

While developing his story, Anderson came across another movie exploring the same idea: Melody (1971), directed by Waris Hussein and written by Alan Parker. For Entertainment Weekly he called that and Ken Loach’s Black Jack (1979) “kind of huge inspirations for Moonrise Kingdom.” (Black Jack is an adaptation of Leon Garfield’s historical novel; I haven’t seen it.)

Melody flopped when it first came out in the UK and US, but was saved from total obscurity by becoming a huge hit in Japan and Latin America. Even now it’s hard to find good cuts in the US; fans recommend the Japanese DVD and a region-2 player.

Melody is one of my guilty-pleasure favorites: I see its flaws, including a cloying undercurrent and an ending that exploits 1960s radicalism without taking it anywhere, but I find it terribly affecting nonetheless—even the pre-disco Bee Gees songs.

The movie is set in a London comprehensive school; as an American I can only begin to parse the film’s discussion of class. The first act introduces Danny (Mark Lester from Oliver!) and his boy-crush on Cockney classmate Ornshaw (Jack Wild, also from Oliver!); the second act shows Danny transferring his affection to a girl named Melody (Tracy Hyde); and the third follows what happens when that young couple decides to get married.

Yet another movie going over the same territory was George Roy Hill’s A Little Romance (1979), with young Diane Lane and Thelonius Bernard. Sir Laurence Olivier was on hand gulping down great mouthfuls of Continental scenery, and critics were unkind, but the kids are good.

What makes Small Change and Melody so enjoyable is that their love stories play out on a field of deep naturalism. The latter film shows us boisterous multicultural schoolrooms, London streets, Melody’s working-class family, Danny’s awful bourgeois parents, the school’s athletics day, and so on. Other movies about kids that share that naturalistic approach include Little Fugitive (1953) and Kenny & Company (1976).

In contrast, Wes Anderson creates arch, artificial worlds. In Rushmore some reality broke through its hero’s self-protective artifice; think of Bill Murray’s visit to the barbershop. But there’s no tether to the real world in Moonrise Kingdom, as hard as Bruce Willis tries. The young leads may be the best part of the movie, but they’re not playing real kids; their characters are brightly-painted Sims.

So after I saw Moonrise Kingdom, I came home and watched unauthorized extracts from Melody on YouTube.

The Influence of Middle-Grade Fiction on Wes Anderson

Movie director Wes Anderson, born in 1969, grew up reading the children’s books that librarians praised in the 1970s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

That influence was clear the moment that the narrator of The Royal Tenenbaums tells us that two of the siblings had lived surreptitiously in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just as in E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Newbery winner for 1968. That scene took less than a minute, as I recall; any longer, and it would have moved from homage to outright theft.

Anderson of course adapted Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, published in 1970.

According to Hollywood.com, Anderson had some more fantastic middle-grade models in mind for his latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom:

…Anderson returned to many of books and movies he loved as a kid. Anderson recalls Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time [Newbery Medal, 1963], Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (which the director suggests shaped the characterization of his young hero Sam Shakusky) and Susan Cooper’s ’60s [actually 1965 and 1973-77] fantasy series, The Dark Is Rising [Newbery Honor in 1974, Newbery Medal in 1977].

Anderson calls the first book in the saga, Under Sea Under Stone, “a tease,” in that at the core of the epic tale was a touching family story. But that didn’t stop him from immersing himself in the more fantastic elements as a kid.

Anderson was right in detecting something different about that first volume: Cooper didn’t envision the more fantastic sequels when she wrote it. In the US it even came from a different publisher. The epic qualities arrive in the second volume:

“There’s a poem that includes all these different symbols and talisman, and there’s this whole sort of mythology associated with it,” Anderson fondly remembers. “But it does not have the complexity of Tolkien. It’s young adult novel feeling, from the ’50s, ’60s, so there’s a sort of simplicity at the same time that there’s a very fleshed-out fantasy world. I remember carrying and wearing objects that I was imbuing with the powers of these talismans that were in the series.”

I don’t think the term “young adult” applies to any of those books, however. (Even Huckleberry Finn is either middle-grade or adult.) They’re all middle-grade novels, most about finding capability instead of finding identity. But of course “young adult” is a hot term today.

TOMORROW: The greatest influences on Moonrise Kingdom.