Alright, I’ve got a bunch of questions after seeing Moonrise Kingdom tonight, but the two best ones have to do with Bill Murray’s character…
[SPOILER]1) What’s the deal with the black eye he gets? Supposedly his daughter takes the batteries from his flashlight and so he falls into a ditch, but we never see that scene. Instead, we get some awkward pillow talk that either implies something or nothing (but I can’t tell which). All I’m saying is that a black eye isn’t the traditional make up to put on someone that fell into a ditch…
After the kids are “rescued”, Bill Murray decides to spend some quality time in the woods with an axe and a bottle of wine. Is this just an excuse for his character to get out of the house and get drunk, or is there some other subtext I’m missing?[/SPOILER]
The black eye is also a callback to an earlier scene in which the runaway girl says that she brought extra batteries for the record player. Then we see that Bill Murray fell in a ditch because she took the batteries out of his flashlight.
That’s true, but we don’t actually see it happen; it’s what they say happened, which may or may not be the truth. I like that we never really know for sure.
Thematically, though, a black eye it the perfect accoutrement for a guy who’s essentially getting beaten up by life.
The vague impression I got was that the wife of the Bill Murray character would occasionally hit him. :eek: IIRC, after Murray showed up for the search with the black eye and Willis’ policeman character asked him how he got it, he repeated the question to her as they were more-or-less out of earshot, and she replied to the effect that he really did fall this time. The awkward bedtime conversation. with references to apologies for unspecified (or unmentionable) wrongs, reinforced my impression.
IIRC, in bed she apologizes to him for his injuries and he says something about how the ones that hurt were self-inflicted.
To me there was a strong implication that she hit him, but it was a bit ambiguous. Her beating him doesn’t actually make a lot of sense in context, but it’s what I took away from the dialogue.
Regarding question 2, besides the obvious need to burn some anger for reasons **zombywoof **stated,
I got the impression there was a scene or two edited out of the final script. I thought for sure that half-chopped down tree and the storm were going to cause major damage to their house, or their car, or something.
I thought that was implied, too. It was a little strange in that the movie did not pay much attention to it, but the implication was there.
Actually I thought he chopped the tree in such a way that if the storm had blown it over, it would’ve fallen away from the house. I’m not sure if he was doing that on purpose and they never came back to it.
I felt like at least another 20 min. of usable scenes were left on the cutting room floor. From that uncomfortable jumpcut after our hero is struck by lightning to the underdeveloped relationship with the antagonist (the Khaki Scout that got stabbed), this film didn’t flow the same way The Royal Tenenbaums or Life Aquatic did. I wonder if this movie will turn out like Donnie Darko, where the deleted scenes give concrete answers to aspects left intentionally ambiguous in the final cut.
That would have been great! He could have told his kids not to worry, he cut it so it would fall away from the house, but the wind could be strong enough to just push it whichever way it wanted, and it falls on the house.