Jeffrey Overstreet on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, a film I love:

For all of their insights, the children need the community that assembles in the “ark” of that storm-battered church. They need loving fathers and mothers, so they aren’t swept away. What will the grownups hold on to, to keep from falling?

An answer is suggested in the film’s climactic image—bold as a woodcut, resonant as a hallelujah chorus. It left me thunderstruck.

I don’t know if Overstreet or Anderson is aware, but it was a very prominent medieval trope to see Noah’s Ark as a typological figure of the church–the church is a refuge for sinners just as the Ark was a refuge. I loved seeing (through Overstreet’s deft parallel) that medieval typology mirrored in Anderson’s ‘60’s-tinted world.