RUSHMORE
Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson's New York
Film Festival sensation is the hilarious and inventive tale of
a kid who longs to be an adult and an adult who longs to be a
kid. The film's central character is the BMOC at Rushmore Academy,
15-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman, unafraid, like Christina
Ricci in The Opposite of Sex, to show the arrogance in
this self-absorbed brat), an academic underachiever but an extracurricular
dynamo. The bespectacled Max looks like a typical prep-school
bully target (he resembles both Shine's Noah Taylor and
Dustin Hoffman), but for a nerd, he has a surprisingly high amount
of self-confidence and is quite the man about campus.
The energy with which Max pours himself
into his countless extracurricular activities (from beekeeping
to publishing the school paper) and the bombastic school plays
he writes and produces (like a hilarious stage version of Serpico)
has won him lots of admirers, including one of the school's benefactors,
businessman Herman Blume (Bill Murray). Unhappy with his marriage
and his life — his twin sons are the kids from hell —
Blume is essentially an overgrown kid trapped in a grown-up's
world. He sees a little bit of himself in Max, and the kid finds
a kindred spirit in Blume. Max seeks the entrepreneur's help in
building a large aquarium, one of his many attempts at impressing
Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), the first-grade teacher he has the
hots for. However, Blume ends up falling in love with Miss Cross
too, and a war ensues between the two friends.
In his first movie, Schwartzman is terrific,
as are Seymour Cassel, as Max's sad-eyed, understanding barber
father, and Murray, who's not playing yet another sharp-witted
wiseguy, but the classic Murray timing is all there in Blume.
His character says very little, but Murray does so much with a
simple expression that his performance is one of the year's finest
— comic or dramatic. (Murray was robbed by the Academy, which
lately seems to be afraid of comedies and satires like Rushmore
and The Truman Show.) Also extraordinary are the film's
look and style. Rushmore takes place in the present day,
but it looks like it's set in the '60s. With the seemingly antiquated
setting, the bizarre camera angles, the slow motion shots and
the obscure '60s British rock songs on the soundtrack, Anderson's
style is like a cross between the Scorsese of Mean Streets
and '60s British angry-young-man dramas.
The film has divided reviewers into
two camps: those who love it and those who hate it. You know what
side I'm on. The critics taking part in the backlash against Rushmore
find Max to be an unlikable, repugnant protagonist and think the
film fawns over his worldview. I think they're watching another
movie. They're also taking Rushmore too seriously. Max
is supposed to be sometimes unlikable, repugnant, immature and
self-centered — aren't most kids at Max's age like that?
— and the film pokes fun at his vanity and ego. I don't think
it fawns over him. But Rushmore also makes us understand
why Blume and Max's classmates are so taken by this misfit, because
of his creativity and his refusal to be a punching bag for his
enemies at school.
Rushmore
is one of the year's funniest comedies, not just because of its
deadpan wit, but because like South Park, the film nails
the way kids talk and behave — their cruelty to each other,
their goofy attempts to act like adults, the nonstop cursing they
think makes them sound mature. Any film or show that claims to
accurately capture the way kids act just looks pathetic compared
to South Park, and now, Rushmore.
© 2001 Jim Aquino