“I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

There are two scenes in Moonrise Kingdom in which Wes Anderson breaks form and stages a conversation in a split screen view. Both scenes involve a conversation between the Island Police Captain Sharp and an adult deciding the fate of the film’s troubled young protagonist, a boy named Sam Shakusky.

The decision to use a split screen in a conversation like this isn’t necessarily unique in and of itself; what is distinctly effective about the choice, however, is when Anderson chooses to linger on the scene, and when he cuts away.

In the first split screen vignette, Sam’s foster father tells Captain Sharp that he can’t take Sam back after the island scout camp is over, as it’d be unfair to “the others”; when Sharp asks what he’s supposed to do with Sam, the foster father replies, “That’s up to Social Services. They’ll be in touch with you. They’ll look after Sam. Good luck to you.” Both men hang up their respective phones. Instead of cutting away immediately, however, Anderson lingers for a beat while the foster father breathes a heavy sigh and guiltily darts his eyes back and forth on one side of the screen while Captain Sharp, deflated, slowly removes his headset on the other.

In the second split screen vignette, Captain Sharp speaks with the aforementioned Social Services representative. Sharp and Scout Master Ward inquire about what will happen to the boy, to which Social Services replies, “Normally, we’d try to place him in another foster home, but that option is no longer available to us, in my opinion, due to his case history — which means he’ll go to Juvenile Refuge.” The men clarify that that means an orphanage. To make matters worse, Social Services casually tells them that there’s a chance that, given Sam’s violent history, he might have to undergo electroshock therapy. She then abruptly ends the conversation.

Anderson again lingers on the split screen a beat longer, though, while Social Services stamps case files, emits a brief sigh, and then picks up the phone to make her next call. Captain Sharp, deflated, removes his headset and stares at the wall while Scout Master Ward starts to eat a lemon bar for comfort on the other half of the screen.

The conversations themselves serve as important plot points — they both offer information about our main character and steer his journey in a new direction while raising the dramatic stakes. But the beats directly after the conversations serve a thematic purpose, and it’s essential to our understanding of the film that Anderson lingers in both instances.

It’s clear, in both scenarios, that all parties end the conversations feeling uneasy about the outcome. More important than that, however, is that it’s clear by their reactions that, without much fight, they’ve resigned themselves to the notion that it is what it is — there’s nothing that they can do about it.

Knowing when a scene should end — and when it’s okay to linger — is just as important as knowing what a scene should say.

Cutting away from these two scenes earlier would’ve kept the plot moving in much the same way, but the scenes — and the film, by extension — wouldn’t have meant as much.

Unconventional framings communicate information about characters and themes elegantly and efficiently throughout Moonrise Kingdom. Suzy, for example, is often seen looking through her trusty binoculars — because, in her words: “It helps me see things closer. Even if they’re not very far away. I pretend it’s my magic power.”

Anderson breaks from standard form in several of these scenes, making us privy to the subjects of Suzy’s gaze by masking her point of view shots with the outline of binocular vision.

In the most voyeuristic of these scenes, Suzy stares down from the top of a tall lighthouse at her own mother secretly meeting with Captain Sharp. The vignette of binoculars frame proof of Suzy’s mother’s affair with Captain Sharp. This affair is something that most of the adult characters in Moonrise Kingdom completely ignore, or at least refuse to see, until it is absolutely undeniable to them. But Suzy zooms right in on it.

In this particular context, the quirky binocular framing device not only shows us that Suzy is perceptive — it reminds us that children see and pick up on all sorts of things that adults often choose to ignore. Children’s awareness is deeper than we give them credit for, and their opinions and feelings, therefore, are more valid than adults often assume.

But what’s key here is that Suzy sees without hearing or understanding — she’s perceptive and picks up on the messy actions of adults, but she doesn’t have the context or emotional intelligence yet to understand what’s actually going on. She’s just hurt, angry, and confused by what she sees from afar.

It’s clear to us, for example, that Suzy Bishop’s father is severely depressed. But, because so much of Moonrise Kingdom is framed from the point of view of children, he’s most often seen as a bumbling caricature of a depressed man instead of a fully-formed depressed character.

The kids don’t see his state for what it is because they have no context to understand him; they just recognize him as quirky and erratic. He doesn’t try to explain himself to his kids. He’s just confusingly present in the background most of the time.

In a particularly amusing and thoroughly confusing scene, Anderson places the camera at the eye level of Suzy’s three little brothers as they play a board game together. Without cutting away from this child’s view angle, we watch a shirtless Mr. Bishop walk down the stairs holding a bottle of whisky, remove an axe from a closet door, turn to his sons, and say, “I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down.”

It’s a funny moment for the film’s audience, and it’s likely that most adults understand the man’s mindset here — but for the kids in the scene, seeing their father do something like this with no explanation would be unsettling and, perhaps, anxiety-provoking. It’s key here that Anderson never explains this action, follows up with Bill Murray’s character after, or cuts away from the kids’ point of view.

By showing us the scene through their eyes, we are better able to wrap our heads around the confusing impact that this kind of behavior might have on them on a day-to-day basis.

Other adult characters — like Scout Master Ward — are better with children, at least interpersonally. Ward genuinely gets excited about the rituals and play of scouts at summer camp. But even he is portrayed as someone who falls comically short of capable of taking care of young, impressionable kids. His inability to keep track of his scouts sets the plot into motion, and his character’s incompetence is elucidated, quite brilliantly, not by statements or active choices but by actions and directives left unaddressed — he’s more guilty of errors of omission than commission.

At the start of the film, for example, Scout Master Ward sees the boys building a treehouse on top of a thin trunk at a dangerous height. He immediately flags it as a concern: “That’s not a safe altitude. Why is it up so high? If someone falls from there, that’s a guaranteed death.”

“Where would you have built it?” a scout retorts. “Lower,” he commands, before moving on to deal with more pressing matters.

Later in the film, the scouts gather in that same treehouse, still teetering at a dangerous, deadly height.

Though Anderson portrays most of the adults in this film as either lost and hopeless (Suzy’s parents), or childlike and inept (Scout Master Ward), he does so with empathy; one of the most moving things about Moonrise Kingdom — and Anderson’s acclaimed The Royal Tenenbaums, for that matter — is how kindly and gently Anderson addresses the theme of intergenerational trauma.

The parental figures in both films never quite get it right; their own hang-ups and unresolved conflicts trickle down to — and mess up — the children that they’re responsible for.

But Anderson’s sentiment isn’t outright condemnation. It’s solemn understanding, paired with a healthy dose of humor at the absurdity of it all.

The adults in Moonrise Kingdom live lives either of boredom and rebellion, or adventure and ineptitude — rarely do they fall healthily in between. The kids, importantly, function in much the same way. They get angry at their parents, then impulsively run away from home. They ride motorcycles through the woods, then stab each other with left-handed scissors and run their bikes into a tree.

What Anderson seems to be saying here is that the kids and the adults are more alike than different — kids just lack context, and adults frequently struggle with an inability to handle the responsibility assigned to them. It’s no accident that Mr. Bishop tries to attack Captain Sharp with the same makeshift battle axe that one of the kids created when they tried to hunt for Sam Shakusky in the wilderness.

At least the kids (especially Suzy and Sam) have more fun with it all — their adventures enthrall them, their dance parties together on the beach mean the world to them, and where adults might see a place and factually call it Mile 3.25 Tidal Inlet, they see the same place and imaginatively call it Moonrise Kingdom.

But while Moonrise Kingdom is a loving ode to that kind of intelligence, love, and imagination that children are capable of revealing to the world, it is also a cautionary tale about the inability of children to manage the harsh realities of the world on their own, and how it’s up to adults to guide them as best as we can in spite of our own imperfections.

Anderson makes a key choice at the film’s thundering climax that elucidates the theme above and ties all of these ruminations on children and adults together quite beautifully. The storm that rages through the island is the perfect metaphor for the absolute havoc that life can throw at us. Cornered in the storm with nowhere to turn, Sam and Suzy see no way out but to jump to their potential deaths. It’s up to the most qualified adult in this moment to make a sacrifice, take matters into his own hands, and save them before they make a bad decision that they can’t come back from. The heightened situational drama at the end of the film ladders directly up to the film’s themes.

Right before the storm hits, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop open up to each other while struggling to fall asleep in their separate but closely arranged twin beds. “I hope the roof flies off and I get sucked up into space,” Mr. Bishop tells his wife dryly. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Mrs. Bishop retorts.

“Why?” he asks.

“We’re all they’ve got, Walt.”

Mr. Bishop processes this for a moment as a dramatic choir of children’s voices joins solemn piano melodies on the score. The scene is dramatic and chilling and melancholic, but in spite of the clash of tone compared to most of the rest of the film, it still rings true when he replies,

“It’s not enough.”

The storytelling of Moonrise Kingdom communicates neither pure cynicism nor pure hope; it strikes a delicate balance, which is why that scene works among the more comical.

And that delicate balance is why it equally rings true — and is just as emotionally poignant — when Sam, having survived a direct lightning strike, kisses Suzy in the rain and exchanges a sizzle of pure electricity between their lips… and she tells him something much more beautiful, a sentiment both literally and figuratively true:

“I think you’ve still got lightning in you.”