Wes Anderson’s filmmaking style has evolved over the
years to such extremes of whimsical fantasy that to revisit his second feature,
1998’s Rushmore, feels tame and
almost like a regular movie experience. He was just beginning to hone his
skills at symmetrical and perfectly fastidiously set-dressed diorama-like
compositions. Compare it to the brand new Grand
Budapest Hotel or even The Royal Tenenbaums,
his follow-up to Rushmore, where you’ll
see clearly compartmentalized sets that resemble a doll’s house, and the
earlier film reveals an artist who was learning what kind of worlds he wanted
to create on film.
Watching Rushmore (co-written by Anderson and Owen Wilson) for the first time in about fifteen years affirmed its position as my favorite
(or possibly second) Anderson film. I thought perhaps I would have outgrown it
seeing as how much of my initial attraction to the film was in the young Jason
Schwartzman’s resemblance to me (and the jokes some people made about that at
the time) and to his character, Max Fischer’s, proclivity for paying far more
attention to extra-curricular activities than to academics, a trait shared by
my very good college friend (and the jokes we made about that). Seeing the movie in 1998, I knew who Max Fischer was. I got
him. And I was surprised not only that the film still holds up, but that it
remained true within me to my personal reactions to it.
Schwartzman was too old in 1998 to play the fifteen-year
old Max (so I thought at the time), but now that I’m older and the actor has
matured into more adult roles, he actually looks – and more importantly – acts like
a teenager to me. Max is a terrible student – “one of the worst students we’ve
got,” according to Dr. Guggenheim (Brian Cox), the Dean of Rushmore Academy,
the private school Max attends on scholarship. When he’s not founding clubs,
running the French club, skeet shooting, staging elaborate theatrical productions
adapted (by him) from movies, or editing the paper, he’s saving Latin to
impress Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), the schools’ first grade teacher. She’s a
real beauty and charming so you can understand why Max is attracted to her even
though he doesn’t get at all why it’s never going to happen.
Max’s only friend at school apparently is the ten-year
old Dirk Calloway (Mason Gamble). Later, he befriends the even less age
appropriate Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a Rushmore Academy alumnus who is a
self-made millionaire steel magnate. The role seemed such a departure for
Murray at the time, but now the self-loathing and pathetic Blume looks like the
perfect fit for his droll delivery. The performance is perfect and it catapulted
him to a late-career renaissance that has seen, in addition to an ongoing
collaboration with Anderson (he’s appeared in or voiced a character in all of
his films since), memorable roles in Lost
in Translation and Broken Flowers,
among others.
Max is instinctively aware of his need to impress those
around him. The son of a barber (Seymour Cassel) feels out of place surrounded
by classmates born into the lap of luxury. That’s why he shares such kinship
with Blume, a man who is now rich and probably hates himself for it as much as
he hates that his own sons have become what he loathed as a Rushmore student.
So when they collaborate on a project (Blume’s money and Fischer’s ideas) to
build an aquarium facility on the Rushmore grounds to impress Miss Cross, it is
perfectly within character for both of them. Max desperately wants Miss Cross’s
attention while Herman couldn’t care less about throwing his money away. What
Max didn’t count on was that Miss Cross and Blume would hit it off so well.
The unique tone Anderson strikes in Rushmore has Max acting far more adult in many ways than his years
suggest. To some extent, he’s more grown up even than Herman. Curiously, the
adults surrounding him also treat him not like a teenager with outlandish
fantasies and not even as if they’re just indulging the whimsy of a kid, but
more like it’s totally normal for a boy his age to write a stage production of Serpico or woo a woman twice his age.
That’s all part of the world Anderson sets these characters in. It’s a world
where none of the silly antics or odd behaviors are considered bizarre. It’s a
movie world and Anderson is acutely aware of the inherent artifice. In Rushmore we see those seeds germinating
that will eventually flourish into ever more artificial productions. Max
himself creates a sort of artificial world for himself to live in – one that
seems composed of movies he might have seen (or at least those that Anderson
has seen). There’s the Serpico
production for one, but also his big final opus, a Vietnam stage epic obviously
modeled on Apocalypse Now (perhaps
even an extra-artificial hat tip toward Schwartzman’s uncle Francis Coppola).
Max’s actions are even modeled on movie behaviors and relationships. The things
he does to win over Miss Cross are lifted from film romances. When he asks Herman
about his experience in Vietnam - “were
you in the shit?” – it’s a line that comes from the mind of a 90s teenager
whose entire knowledge of that war stems from movies like Platoon or Hamburger Hill.
Upon being expelled from Rushmore, he asks Dr. Guggenheim if they can keep him
around “for old times’ sake,” the same thing poor old Tessio pleads of Michael
before being sent to his execution at the end of The Godfather.
Max is an artificial character in a fake movie world. He’s
a product of a generation inundated by images from TV and movies. He’s even an
early version of the idea of the millennial generation, those young folks who
we lament nowadays know nothing of the classics and only know about what they
see on the Internet. It’s just that Max lived in a
pre-Facebook-Twitter-Instagram world. Rushmore
remains a unique work from one of America’s finest visionary directors. That no
one else is imitating him I think suggests more about the difficulty in
capturing a combined sense of whimsy and satire that maybe only Anderson know
how to tap into so eloquently.
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