Rushmore Is A Phenomenal Examination of A Teenager Coming To Terms With Reality

Allow me to cut to the chase here and say, upfront and outright, that I absolutely loved Rushmore. This is a movie that just captured my attention from the moment it began and even long after its credits stopped rolling it's still occupying a space in my mind. The reasons for this are numerous, but before I detail those reasons, allow me to establish what exactly this motion picture is about. Rushmore begins by introducing our lead character, fifteen-year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), in a math class where the teacher has put up a math problem that nobody he's ever known has been able to solve for extra credit. Putting down the newspaper he's reading in class, Fischer goes up to the board to solve it.


After some time, he reaches an answer that the teacher deems correct. His fellow students cheer for him and lift him up on their shoulders, a moment of jubilant victory interrupted by Fischer waking up in the middle of a church service. The kind of academic success and adoration by his peers that were the cornerstone of that dream are simply that, aspects of a dream. In reality, Fischer is an oddball at the private school Rushmore Academy that he attends. Fischer does not fit into the tidy personality boxes most High School movies fit their characters into, he's neither jock nor nerd nor any other similar archetype. He's his own creation, a scrawnier kid who walks and talks like he's the ladies man that redefines the word suave.


Making Fischer this kind of human being not defined by teenager stereotypes makes the protagonist of Rushmore a realistically complex individual as well as a character who could only be described as "one-of-a-kind". This highly unorthodox individual meets local businessman Herman Blume (Bill Murray) at that church service he was dozing off in, with a speech Blume gives during the service resonating deeply with Fischer and seemingly only Fischer judging by the otherwise tepid response his speech received. Blume is like Fischer in that he doesn't really fit into the world he resides in, specifically the world of his home life which is just crumbling around him. Perhaps it is because of this shared sense of isolation from the world around them that Fischer and Blume strike up a friendship that becomes one of the core aspects of Rushmore.

It's easy to imagine a typical movie using this set-up for a story about the world needing to accept oddballs like Fischer and Blume but Rushmore goes in a far more interesting direction with a tale that is heavily and sharply critical of its lead character. Though a number of Max Fischer's experiencing emerge from the real-life teenage experiences of the movies two writers, Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, this is not a film dedicated to Anderson and Wilson looking back on their teenage selves with rose-colored glasses. Instead, Fischer's artsy-fartsy teenager character is depicted as someone who's a more realistic teenager, a heavily flawed and self-centered individual whose quirks are frequently used to typically point to greater internal problems rather than simply elicit an "Oh, that rascal!" response from the viewer.

This is most notable in Fisher's pursuit of Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), a teacher at his academy that he's developed a romantic fondness for. This part of Fischer's life is immediately shown to be a microcosm of his tendency to treat the people in his life as objects he can just shuffle around rather than as people with their own sense of individuality and desires. Amazingly, Anderson and Wilson are able to make Rushmore a dissection of Fischer's flaws as a person while also maintaining a love for this lead character. Their writing makes it clear Fischer isn't an inherently bad person, he's a teenager coming to terms with the complexities of reality, an experience that we've all been through albeit while going through far different adventures than the ones Fischer engages in.

Fischer may be more cultured than many of his classmates but he's still gotta grow up in other key ways, a process that actor Jason Schwartzman, in his acting debut, proves to be able to handle aplomb. Schwartzman absolutely kills it in playing Max Fischer, his line deliveries showing an expert sense of timing and the way he conveys Fischer's sense of worldly intellectualism in his body language and posture in a manner that suggests this is very much what kid thinks worldly intellectualism looks like is a hoot. Hell, I'd say the performance is killer just for the hilarious way he exits an elevator and then, in a moment of victory, places his gum on the wall, that moment alone shows some assured acting that's present throughout his lead performance here.

Making his first appearance in a Wes Anderson movie before he would go on to be in each of the director's subsequent projects, Bill Murray does fine work here, he ends up having fun chemistry in his scenes with Schwartzman while also constantly getting across this sense of sad confusion that is consuming his characters life. That sense of melancholy plaguing Herman Blume is constantly there throughout the rest of the film and it's that sense of subdued of despondency that turns out to be one of the best aspects of Rushmore as a whole. Max Fischer's so well-realized as a character that even his most egregious acts of selfishness (and there are plenty of those) aren't enough to get one to lose sympathy for how he's clearly struggling to adapt to a more complex world than he expected. As he slowly begins to learn, there's a sense of vital humanity missing by treating everyone around you as objectives you can check off on a clipboard.

It's this growth that Fischer goes through during the story that fits in with a larger theme in Wes Anderson's filmography. This man's movies are known for their sense of stylized whimsy, which is certainly in high supply in Rushmore, especially in the recurring use of a large blue stage curtain that marks when the story is shifting into a new month. But unlike other pieces of art dedicated to fanciful visuals and a daffy tone that typically revolve around just having fun or eschewing the worries of adulthood, Wes Anderson movies are typically all about how people (like Max Fischer, Mr. Fox, Dignan or Royal Tenenbaum) who find ruin in constantly engaging in immature selfishness. Anderson's works are typically about the importance of learning to grow up and that's evident in the core theme of his second motion picture, Rushmore.

All of this extensive talk about the fascinating thematic undercurrents of this incredible movie and I still haven't gotten to talk about so many other aspects of Rushmore! Like, for instance, the humor in it, which works utter magic in its use of deadpan line readings while there are all kinds of lovely pieces of subtle bits of editing & camerawork that instilled massive amounts of giggles from yours truly. Plus, as a native Texan (just like Wes Anderson himself!), I adore how Rushmore feels like it actually takes place here in Texas, just the way the buildings and houses look feels so true to real-life. And then there's the soundtrack, an excellent assortment of tunes from artists ranging from The Who to John Lennon that are put to wonderful use in the feature proper, with the Yusuf/Cat Stevens tune The Wind being especially well-placed in where it plays in the story. One could go on and on with how great Rushmore is, it's a film that manages to crystalize core aspects of the overarching themes of Wes Anderson's entire filmography and it's also just a phenomenal movie in its own right. Oh, and remember, Max Fischer saved Latin!