The kids’ epistolary courtship – laid out in the reading-of-the-letters sequence, one of Anderson’s most compact and propulsive bits of direction – makes their predicament clear. The images are hilarious and disturbing: Suzy has an altercation in a classroom and lays another girl out; Sam sleepwalks and sets fires. He’s an according-to-Hoyle orphan; Suzy feels like one, because her lawyer parents, Laura and Walt, are so wrapped up in their martial troubles (including Laura’s affair with Bruce Willis’ Captain Sharp, the “sad, dumb policeman”, a relationship that’s less cause than symptom) that they can’t see their kids as kids. Walt is a slump-shouldered shell of a man, while Laura is all fretful, furtive glances, punctuated by edicts shouted through a bullhorn. Their solution to their daughter’s at-risk behavior is to buy a book titled “Coping With the Very Troubled Child” and hide it on top of the refrigerator. Anxiety, fear and a creeping sense of personal failure afflict nearly every adult in "Moonrise." The kids have their whole lives ahead of them, but the grownups worry that their best years are behind them, and that they’re frittering away the present.
“I hope the roof flies off, and I get sucked up into space,” Walt tells Suzy, in a rare, frank bedtime conversation. “You'll be better off without me.”
Things only start to turn around after the adults bust up Sam and Suzy’s reverie. Captain Sharp, who will eventually become the true father figure Sam always needed, replies to his “something happened” speech with the film’s first piece of useful adult wisdom. “That's very eloquent,” he tells the boy. “I can't argue against anything you're saying. But then again, I don't have to, because you're twelve years old. Look, let's face it, you're probably a much more intelligent person than I am. In fact, I guarantee it. But even smart kids stick they're fingers in electrical sockets sometimes. It takes time to figure things out. It's been proven by history. All mankind makes mistakes. It's our job to try to protect you from making the dangerous ones, if we can.”
You get the sense that eventually, the adult world of New Penzance will step up, to the degree that it's able, and become better guardians for Sam and Suzy. But it takes a crisis to force the grownups' hands, and the wisdom of children to push them down the correct path. A storm is coming – not just the actual storm descending on the island, but a metaphorical storm of chaos and darkness, founded in the inattention and selfishness of adults. They perpetuate all their own values, even the bad ones, without thinking, at times without feeling.
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