Rushmore Rating *** A must see Directed by Wes Anderson Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson With Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Seymour Cassel, Brian Cox, Mason Gamble, Sara Tanaka, Stephen McCole, Connie Nielsen, and Luke Wilson.
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The film is a comedy about Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a 15-year-old student at Rushmore Academy, a private school in a small town, who’s too wrapped up in a bevy of extracurricular activities–hilariously cataloged in one extended montage sequence–to finish his schoolwork. Max develops a crush on a young, widowed grammar school teacher named Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), befriends a local millionaire and Rushmore graduate named Herman Blume, gets expelled, enrolls in public school at Grover Cleveland High, and writes and stages elaborate plays at both schools. (The first one we see him staging is derived from the 1973 movie Serpico.) He’s always a bit ridiculous, and so is Blume, but everyone in the movie is accorded a certain dignity that keeps him lovable. Significantly, the character initially introduced as Blume–played by Bill Murray at his most inspired, with a characteristic mix of quizzical distraction and terminal world-weariness–eventually becomes known to us as Herman, and even Max’s father, played with amiable sweetness by Seymour Cassel, finally registers as just plain Bert.
Comparable gifts crop up in almost every scene. Some involve Max’s father, whose doting and nonjudgmental affection is undiminished by either Max’s horrible grades or his defensive claims to Herman and his wealthier Rushmore classmates that his barber father is a neurosurgeon. Some involve Rosemary’s gentle negotiation of Max’s infatuation and her own guarded affection for him; some involve the fluctuating friendship between Max and Herman; and still others relate to Max’s shifting relationships with Dirk, with his worst enemy at Rushmore–a Scottish bully named Magnus who’s much older, played by Stephen McCole–and with Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka), a classmate at Grover Cleveland who likes him in spite of everything.
The play itself is about reconciliation; it ends with Max, playing an American grunt, proposing to a Vietcong guerrilla played by Margaret Yang, his new girlfriend. It also leads to other reconciliations: between Max and Magnus, Rosemary and Herman, Max and Rosemary. There’s even a reconciliation between Max and Rosemary’s friend from Harvard, a young man whom Max drunkenly castigated as an interloper at a dinner after the premiere of his previous play. Unlike the madder schemes of Max and Herman, this optimistic ending bears some recognizable relation to the real world: not only has the past become integrated with the present, but the invented world of Rushmore has become wide enough to encompass our own.
