"Here’s the question: can we afford whimsy right now, especially a whimsy born of a nostalgia for the era “before the great storm” wiped out, or at least marginalized, all the polite, literate, sensitive, ingenious white kids who white people fantasize were thriving once upon a time? “Moonrise Kingdom,” the magical cove, must get washed away because that’s the logic of adult nostalgia, you can’t go back to that first crush, a first love, or lost childhood adventures. But when nestled within this larger island of quirky white people, the passing of Moonrise Kingdom implies a loss of social innocence as well, a caesura before America’s growing racial, cultural, and technological diversity would transform Franny and Zooey into Snooki and the Situation. There is the troubling sense in this film that white America was and is ever more whimsical the more it is cut-off from the surrounding social world, in this case on an island, in a hurricane, now lost in time."