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Moonrise Kingdom and the Divine Symphony

Here’s an excerpt from my review of Moonrise Kingdom:

Moral watchdogs will bark at these under-aged kids on their hideout honeymoon. In doing so, they miss the greater crisis: Who can these kids reach out to for help? Not these unfaithful, cacophonous adults. As in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, another film about the consequences of a generation that called self-indulgence freedom, they have no moral high ground.

At least Sam and Suzy have a sense of the sacred: a love characterized by commitment, tenderness, forgiveness, service, intellectual stimulation, and, yes, physical intimacy. Performed for these pursuers—the very people who have given these kids good reason to run—this Romeo and Juliet’s adventure in intimacy is something like the play Hamlet stages for his uncle in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: It’s a picture that just might “catch the conscience.”

As the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote:

By performing the divine symphony, all the instruments of creation discover why they have been assembled together. Initially they stand or sit next to one another as strangers, in mutual contradiction. Suddenly, as the music begins, they realize how they are integrated. Not in unison, but what is far more beautiful—in symphony.

Read the rest of the review here, at Good Letters.