dir Wes Anderson, scrpl Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson, cin Robert Yeoman, ed David Moritz
Miss Cross: Is this fake blood?
Max: Yes it is.
Miss Cross: You know, you and Herman deserve each other. You're both little children. Let me show you the door.
Max: I'll just go back out the window.
Kids tend to take everything too seriously. I think that when you’re young, before life throws you too many curves, you simply don’t know how to respond to crises, so everything just kind of becomes disproportionately important in your limited frame of reference. That about summarizes Max Fischer's story in Rushmore, Wes Anderson’s sophomore effort.
As a kid, my parents used to say I had a “one-track mind,” fixating on whatever my current obsession, to the apparent annoyance of everyone else around me. Well, Rushmore’s Max has a one-track mind too, fixating first on Rushmore Academy, the tony private school where he is a scholarship student, then onto befriending Bill Murray’s Herman Blume and finally fixating on one of Rushmore’s teachers, Miss Cross (Olivia Williams).
The film is played for laughs. Max’s obsession with school is harmless enough. He’s a terrible student, but involved in a parade of extra-curricular activities, each more absurd than the last. And his relationship with Herman, the wealthy father of two obnoxious schoolmates, also begins sweetly—two lost misfits identify with one another, in spite of their disparate age and experience.
Frankly, though, when Max falls for the teacher, the movie becomes a little unsettling. If Anderson had decided to make a dramatic thriller, Rushmore could have become a Fatal Attraction (1987) for the prep-school set. It couldn’t have turned out any worse that Mark Wahlberg’s stalker vehicle, Fear (1996).
Instead, it’s played very broadly with Max, after finding out that Herman is also in love with Miss Cross, cutting the brake line in Herman’s car, and later attempting to topple a tree on his older competition. And apart from spying on her, taking surveillance photos and trying to have her fired, Max doesn’t really do anything terrible to Miss Cross.
Still, more than once, I tried to imagine what I’d do if I were Miss Cross—here in the real world, not in Anderson’s more playful universe. And I can assure you, I’d have involved the police and a restraining order.
But Anderson’s world is more precious than that. Max and Herman are both obsessive, but in a such an immature childlike way, they cannot possible be threatening.
I must admit when I first saw Rushmore I didn’t care for it very much. I felt that maybe it was a bit too precious. When it was first released, I hadn’t seen Bottle Rocket and in early 1999, when everyone seemed to be raving about Rushmore, I hadn’t heard of Wes Anderson and had no idea what to expect. Maybe it was the hype, or maybe it was my expectations for a comedy with Bill Murray, but this was not Stripes or Caddyshack.
I do like the film much more today. Escaping from the baggage of expectations, it’s a much smaller film than I remembered, more intimate. And in revisiting it, as with Bottle Rocket, I couldn’t help but marvel at Anderson’s gifts, more as a visualist than as a storyteller. His cinematic style is much more clearly defined here.
As I was watching, I repeatedly noted the composition and shots filmed at 90° angles I commented on yesterday. As I studied the balanced framing of characters, I thought to myself, Wes Anderson must have OCD. Then I realized that I was starting to fixate on the visual composition—studying horizon lines, admiring the placement of people and objects in the frame— and that I was precariously close to loosing track of the story.
Perhaps I’m the one with OCD. That one-track mind, I guess…
A final random note for today. The music in Anderson’s films is always top-notch and almost impossibly good. However, John Lennon’s Oh, Yoko is such a personal love note, that it still seems jarringly misplaced here. Then again, I suppose any popular rock song that makes it’s way into the soundtrack of a film, without any direct corollary to the action on-screen is a bit misplaced, when you think about it.