Rushmore

Wes Anderson’s second movie, Rushmore (1998), isn’t for everyone. It is for cynically passionate, unconventionally clever, emotionally immature individuals struggling to understand themselves and find their niche. People who don’t spend their days laughing aloud about the ridiculousness of humans, humanity and the human condition might not get the joke. Needless to say, I really, really like this movie.

Max Fisher (Jason Schwartzman) is an enterprising young man who has won an academic scholarship to attend Rushmore, a prep school that he wouldn’t have been otherwise able to afford to attend, by writing a screenplay. He works and postures hard to prove himself worthy of his enrollment, throwing himself into every extra-curricular activity the school offers. Unfortunately, the fundamental basics of the educational system, especially (and fittingly) math, elude him.

Max cannot allow himself to be distracted by such things as practicality, appropriate behavior and his peer group. At first, his lone friend is Dirk Calloway (Mason Gamble), a boy several years Max’s junior who is an interesting balance of impressionable yet stubborn; although Max not-so-subtly regards the most interesting thing about Dirk to be his gorgeous mom. Then Max befriends Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a Rushmore alum who owns a successful metal working company, after being inspired by a commencement speech Herman gives in which he encourages the less affluent students not to let the spoiled ones, including his own twin sons, have more success than them.

Soon after, Max discovers Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), an elementary teacher with an affinity for fish. To impress her, he immediately takes up smoking, prevents Rushmore’s Latin program from being dropped (because Miss Cross wrote her thesis on Latin American economic policy) and begins planning to have a giant aquarium built, borrowing money from Herman to do it. When he chooses the location for the aquarium and starts digging up the baseball field, Max gets kicked out of Rushmore.

Once Max gets an idea into his head he runs with it without ever asking whether the idea is possible to achieve or worth achieving. Max believes in the cinematic idealism whereby the good guy always prevails. Max’s passion is exactly what Herman lacks. Herman hates himself and everything about his life. He has wealth, but nothing he wants to spend it on. He’s pathetic and he knows it. But he can’t keep himself from falling for Rosemary. Max and Herman are initially attracted to Rosemary in part because she seems to have things together, but are stymied by the fact that she is struggling to deal with the death of her husband. We never find out much about Rosemary and Herman’s relationship, but we don’t really have to because we know it’s never going to last. Herman, like Max, wants someone to take care of him. As it turns out, so does Rosemary.

Dirk finds out Max’s coy lie that he got kicked out of Rushmore for getting a handjob from Dirk’s mom and gets his revenge by telling Max about Herman and Rosemary. Now alone in this world without even Rushmore to distract him, Max has to learn to come to terms with his new school, being ashamed of his father (an unassuming, affable barber), the death of his mother, the betrayal of his friends and, most of all, that emotion we call love.

Rushmore is funny, but only if you find humor in the absurd. We knew this about Murray, but young Schwartzman also turns out to be a natural at deadpan comic delivery. Anderson embraces a Shakespearean wit whereby two kids can carry on a perfectly rational and civil conversation that has been instigated by one shooting the other in the side of the head with a BB gun. Anderson’s style, which he has used to create a catalogue of movies with a consistency in quality matched only by a handful of other directors in the history of cinema, seems equally informed by Martin Scorsese’s sense of frame and action and Hal Ashby’s patient, aware, sophisticated humor. In fact, Rushmore makes enough subtle references to Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) that halfway through you expect a Cat Stevens song to burst out. And then one does.