Rushmore
Has it really been ten years?
It was in 1998 that Wes Anderson gave the world Rushmore. Not since Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) was released did a film so fully encapsulate the feelings of a generation. Some brought up that film a few years ago in discussing Garden State (2004), but I don’t think I need to get into why that film failed. Instead, let me get on with the task of explaining why Anderson’s intricately delicate, delightfully subtle, and ultimately beautiful coming-of-age story may be the greatest film of the 1990s.
As Rushmore opens, Max Fisher (Jason Schwartzman) is daydreaming he’s solving the world’s hardest geometry problem, receiving a great deal of praise from his classmates at the titular prep school. The problem is: Max isn’t the type of kid that gets recognized for his academic achievements; he is, in the words of his headmaster, “one of the worst students we’ve got.” But it is clear Max would rather be known as the president of the beekeeping society, editor of the yearbook, and member of the fencing team than a braniac.
Already on thin ice due to his horrible grades, Max’s fate at Rushmore is further complicated by his burgeoning infatuation for a first grade teacher named Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), whom he approaches after seeing something she wrote in a book by Jacques Cousteau. Their first meeting should be Exhibit A for the awkwardness of being a teenager. After hearing that Rosemary’s doctorate dissertation at Harvard—his “safety school”—was on economic policies in Latin America, he mentions how they’re discontinuing Latin courses to teach Japanese. She corrects him, and he tries to blow it off (“Moving on…”).
For a while it all works beautifully. If this were Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), what follows would be the scenes where all four characters play in the expansive landscapes of the Texas Panhandle, before, of course, they find out it’s all being built on a terrible lie. The loss of Eden in Rushmore, then, comes when Max is expelled from Rushmore for trying to build an aquarium on the school’s baseball diamond, all while Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a Rushmore parent Max has befriended, falls for Rosemary, whom Max now admits he’s in love with.
This being a Wes Anderson movie, the plot develops with a beautiful ease, and if I won’t spoil the way it all works out, suffice it to say that it’s one of the best—and most literate—narratives in recent memory. Anderson also has the marvelous ability to craft incredibly deep human characters out of where other directors would fashion only caricatures. Forgot for a moment how amazingly Schwartzman, Murray, and Williams inhabit their roles, and focus on the way even relatively minor characters like Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka), Max’s charming classmate and eventual love interest at his new public school, and Max’s father (Seymour Cassel) stay with you long after the film has ended. And that’s not even mentioning the undercurrent of class envy that permeates through many of the film’s scenes—this is, after all, a film where a poor kid (“a barber’s son”) tries to find his way into a world of privilege—which Anderson handles with a great deal of care.
For its originality, honesty, and humanism, Rushmore is a film I will always cherish.
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