Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and the play by
Michael Golamco, Build, currently at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, would
not at first glance appear to have anything in common, but they both struck the
same notes with me: creativity,
spontaneous intelligence, innocence, love.
In Build, Kip and Will have been building video
games together since college, and they’ve been successful at it. They also love the same woman, but she’s
dead. Or, is she? This isn’t a play with a ghost, but her
spirit—her intelligence and
creative joy—and her sadness,
has been regenerated via artificial intelligence. It was never clear to me if she was a robot
or her essence was captured—coded,
if you will—and contained
within the computer. She’s alive to Kip
and Will, though, and this ensemble cast transcends the geek trope with their
creative obsessions, but particularly with her zest for Life.
The two men, testy and combative, meet on the
fertile ground of their imaginations and learn something about love—their love for the A.I., but also
for each other. They free themselves by
freeing her.
Moonrise Kingdom also creates a fantasy world where two
12-year-old misfits fall in love and go on an adventure. To say Suzy and Sam run off together would be
to demean their intelligence and organization.
They want nothing to do with a hierarchical world where they’re
considered outsiders, but they have the same innocence and joie de vivre as the
A.I. in Build. While there is a larger
cast in the movie, the close-ups are of the boy and the girl where all their
quirkiness and hunger for the world fills their eyes.
In Build the three characters each change. In Moonrise Kingdom, the children’s lives are
modified, but their love isn’t, they don’t change, but the adults around them
do.
Both movie and play are set pieces for looking back
and confronting the past while at the same time facing the present. Each vehicle is an attempt—eerie, funny, earnest—to bypass the ordinary
through imagination. There is no evil
intelligence here. The characters are
smart and loving. In Build, they
celebrate joy and creativity with the A.I.
In Moonrise Kingdom, Sam and Suzy are
innocent and smart and creative. In the beginning and at the end, their eagerness for life is the same as the A.I.'s.
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