director
Wes Anderson
screenwriters
Wes Anderson
Owen Wilson
producers
Barry Mendel
Paul Schiff
cinematographer
Robert Yeoman
music
Mark Mothersbaugh
editor
David Moritz
cast
Jason Schwartzman (Max Fischer)
Olivia Williams (Rosemary Cross)
Bill Murray (Herman Blume)
Seymour Cassel (Bert Fischer)
Brian Cox (Dr. Guggenheim)
Sara Tanaka (Margaret Yang)
Mason Gamble (Dirk Calloway)
Stephen McCole (Magnus Buchan)
Connie Nielsen (Mrs. Calloway)
Luke Wilson (Dr. Peter Flynn)
Owen Wilson (Yankee Racer)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 93m
u.s.
release (limited):
12/11/98
u.s.
release (wide): 2/5/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
fan site
other wes
anderson films
reviewed on this website:
- the
life aquatic with steve zissou
- the
royal tenenbaums
|
"I
can safely say I've never met anyone like you before," says
a fetching young teacher to Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman),
the 15-year-old hero of Rushmore. Nor is anyone likely
to meet anyone like Max in real life, and very seldom at the
movies. As Rushmore begins, Max is a seriously overachieving
student at Rushmore Academy, where he compensates for his stereotypically
nerdy looks (thick-framed glasses, tinsel teeth) by joining and/or
founding just about every organization at school. He devotes
himself to writing and directing school plays with the zeal of
a young Welles or Spielberg, putting on spectacular shows everyone
will talk about for years. Meanwhile, he's flunking all his classes.
He's a bright kid -- some would say ingenious -- but grades aren't
important to Max; for him, Rushmore is both his playpen and his
canvas. Everything he does is meant to leave the indelible mark
of Max Fischer.
Is Max insufferable? Sure, sometimes -- and one of the surprises
of Rushmore, a sort of cross between Amadeus and
The Graduate, is that Max's outsize ambition is often
shown up for the narcissism it is. He's a kid. He means well,
but he also rolls right over everybody's toes; he's so focused
on achievement he seems near-autistic at times. Director Wes
Anderson, who also wrote the script with Owen Wilson (this is
their second film, after 1996's Bottle Rocket), risks
alienating us: Max is obviously brilliant and just as obviously
a case of arrested development, a boy who lost his mom at an
early age and has thrown himself into distractions ever since.
The movie is about what happens when he collides with another
case of arrested development -- tycoon Herman Blume (Bill Murray),
who befriends this gangly kindred spirit but soon competes with
Max for the affections of the aforementioned teacher, Miss Cross
(Olivia Williams).
Wes Anderson has a distinctive and unstable style; he likes the
sound of different personalities clashing, different moods bumping
together. In Bottle Rocket, a trio of suburban goofballs
fancied themselves aspiring criminals; the story took the form
of a road movie, and just when you thought the plot might tighten
and thicken, it got slack and digressive (and vice versa). Rushmore
is a much more successful mood-swing comedy, with moments of
classic slapstick rubbing elbows with moments of painful candor.
As in so many films about boy dreamers of all ages, the woman
is the pinprick of reality that pops the balloon of male fantasy.
Deflecting Max's advances, swiftly bored with Herman, Miss Cross
is the sanest voice in the movie, yet she, too, has her false
ideal; she takes up with a hunky intern (Luke Wilson) for physical
comfort but can't help comparing every man to her late husband,
whose memory she just about fetishizes.
Everyone is talking about Bill Murray, as if he'd never given
a real performance before. Actually, he's been building a solid
rep as a born-again character actor and supporting player in
films like Ed
Wood and Wild Things, but it's fair to say that
Herman Blume is his first fully mature role (ironic, given Herman's
lapses of golf-ball-tossing, bicycle-wrecking childishness).
The vaguely depressed father of twin sons who have more brawn
than brains, Herman sees Max as both the smart son he never had
and a younger, not-yet-disillusioned version of himself. Murray's
performance is mostly subdued, with flashes of adolescent contempt
popping out like a switchblade (he has a hilarious boozy scene
in a hospital elevator); Anderson and Wilson have written him
a great role, and he brings it home effortlessly.
This is not to slight Jason Schwartzman, a rookie actor who more
than holds his own with Murray, or Olivia Williams, recuperating
nicely from The Postman and captivating us even at her
most brutally honest. Nor should we overlook Wes Anderson's stylized
brand of comedy (his main theme so far seems to be the folly
of ambition), his pitch-perfect selection of oldies that heighten
each scene, his odd use of widescreen for this small-scale teen
movie, as if it were an epic on a par with one of Max's excessive
plays -- it's as if Max wouldn't settle for anything less than
CinemaScope. Rushmore is an ode to creative wunderkinder,
who can be immature pains in the ass (just ask anyone who worked
with Welles or Spielberg way back in the day); most movies wouldn't
exist without them, but they don't exist in most movies. |
