Yes, ‘Moon Garden’ Is a Children’s Movie; No, You Shouldn’t Take Your Children

Sometimes it pays to read the fine print. Toward the end of the press notes accompanying “Moon Garden,” the new movie by Ryan Stevens Harris, there is a list of “fun facts.” The first item concerns the medium itself: Mr. Harris and his cohorts used 100,000 feet of 35mm film stock, the majority of which was recovered from a basement at Omaha, Nebraska. Not only is the stock antiquated by contemporary standards, it has also expired. At which point, fun devolves into nerdiness. Cinematographer Wolfgang Meyer, we are told, utilized cameras with names like “Arri BL4 3-perf,” “Arri BL3 2-perf,” “Eyemo,” and a Devry that had to be cranked by hand because it’s 100 years old and all. Then there are the accordion lenses, underwater gear, and a time-lapse scene that took four months to film. Do you think Mr. Meyer had fun monkeying around with all this stuff? My guess is that he had a great time.Then there’s the lead actress in the film, Augie Duke. Clara Bow we know about, but Ms. Duke is, apparently, the “It Girl of the Indies.” Having not seen such deathless fare as “Bad Kids Go to Hell,” “Giant Killer Hogs,” and “Clown Fear,” I can testify that Ms. Duke strikes a chord all the same, what with her expansive cheekbones, fetching pout, and undeniable screen presence. It’s enough to make a film critic want to go slumming in the grimier corners of cinema culture.Ms. Duke is the lead in “Moon Garden,” but she’s not the star. That would be Haven Lee Harris, an actress who started shooting at age 4 and finished up three years later. Ms. Harris is the director’s daughter, a doe-eyed moppet who comes on like a Shirley Temple who’s read Camus. Ms. Harris’s duties as an actress entail some serious business. Her character, Emma, not only has to withstand her parents’ fracturing marriage, but also a nightmarish realm she’s thrown into upon falling into a coma. Will this medical emergency bring mom and dad together? It’s enough to turn any kindergartner into an existentialist.“Moon Garden” is a curious and somewhat forbidding venture. Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and Guillermo del Toro would likely enjoy the cartoonish grotesqueries with names like “The Mud Witch,” “Three Faces,” and, most indelibly, “Teeth.” Low-fi aesthetes will relish the rickety nature of the Surrealist environments in which our heroine is cast. (At one point, the imagery of Salvador Dali is deliberately referenced; low-fi doesn’t mean low-brow.) Movie-goers who’ve never cottoned to the texture-less artificiality of CGI will want to give Mr. Harris a high-five for his unapologetic embrace of practical effects.Practical and scary. What kind of film is this? No right-thinking parent would take their young son or daughter to a picture as brooding and manic as this one, but “Moon Garden” is a children’s movie all the same. Disney or Pixar wouldn’t touch this kind of thing with a 10-foot pole — unless, that is, they first whittled away the knotty byways and sharp points that are the film’s reason for being. Still, I suspect that Mr. Harris’s “true labor of love” might cause a few suits or, at least, their creative hirelings to sit up and take notice. What it lacks in narrative momentum, “Moon Garden” makes up for in invention, enthusiasm, and an appealing degree of contrariness. We should be happy to live in a world that allows for outliers such as this one.

Yes, ‘Moon Garden’ Is a Children’s Movie; No, You Shouldn’t Take Your Children

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