Moonrise Musings

This week in the wilds of Matunuck, actor Ed Norton is performing scenes as a camp counselor for the next Wes Anderson movie, “Moonrise Kingdom,” which is filming in Rhode Island this spring. Early word from the advance team is that the ticks, no-see-ums and mosquitoes have been brutal – no surprise since they’ve chosen to film some scenes in the Swamp Yankee part of Rhode Island.

In recent weeks, the good folks at Orbie’s Café in Wakefield have been loaning me Anderson flicks along with my daily coffee, starting with “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” “The Darjeeling Express” and “Bottle Rocket,” Anderson’s directorial debut, starring the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke. I had already seen “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums” and I just picked up “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Anderson’s films polarize people, but I’m an unabashed fan. Especially of “The Life Aquatic,” which received his harshest reviews of any film to date.

Mini-review alert: I love the playfulness of its multi-layered, film-within-a-film storytelling. Spectacular visuals and odd details evoke the comparable dreamlike worlds of moviemaking and the aquatic environment, as we watch Team Zissou making a documentary of whatever they encounter (raising the metaphorical questions about truth and illusion, reality and artificiality). The movie works as both a parody and homage of the Jacques Cousteau milieu, with its stories of “jaguar sharks” and “crayon pony fish,” but it resonates more deeply as a story about explorers as heroes, when every 12-year-old boy, if he couldn’t play shortstop for the Red Sox, dreamed of diving the oceans, digging for treasure or blasting off into space in search of adventure. There’s satire in the steady hawking and marketing of Zissou paraphernalia and his constant need for more funding, contrasted with the heavily endowed enterprise of his oceanographer rival (played by Jeff Goldlbum), whose high-tech resources would be at home in a Bond movie. Some of it is surreal, including a couple of modern pirate scenes (no Jack Sparrow romance here…when his college interns fail to join Zissou on a rescue mission, the explorer threatens to give them an incomplete). There are several wonderful touches of wit and aesthetic, such as the Portuguese crewmember that plays his guitar and sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese; those exotic, extra-colorful, “Finding Nemo”-esque marine creatures; and a great cast, including a deadpan, water-weary Bill Murray playing the lead role.

Those who watch a lot of Anderson’s films will note some commonalities, especially in themes and motifs of abandonment, arrested adolescence, the father-son relationship, and portraits of a world in which many of the characters come from money. These are broken people; everyone, at some level, carries a weighted personality that has buried grief or pain. But wrapped around these characters are wonderful scenes that linger visually and emotionally, achieving a quality that feels both literary and cinematic.

So what can we expect from “Moonrise Kingdom?” More of the same, I’d imagine, only with an distinctly Ocean State atmosphere, circa the 1960s. The setting for the film is an island off the coast of New England. A young boy and girl fall and love and run away together. Various factions of the town go out to search for them. From that premise, a movie will bloom.

According to colleague Liz Boardman, the film will be shot entirely in Rhode Island over 44 days this spring, with locations already secured in Jamestown, Portsmouth and Hopkinton. Norton’s scenes will be filmed on part of Bayfield Farm, a South Kingstown Land Trust property off Camp Fuller Road in Matunuck, where a temporary Boy Scout camp of stick-and-canvas tents will be set up amid the pasture land, the juniper trees, rocks and cows.

I still think the turf farms along Slocum Road and Sodco’s massive mechanical irrigator (that looks like a water sprinkler from “The Land of the Giants”) would make a great location for a movie, along with the strange Cold War remnants of lonely buildings and roads at Quonset Point.

Your turn: What Rhode Island setting would make a good movie location?