‘Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down…’
Auteur theory is the concept that there are certain filmmakers who can be considered ‘auteurs’. The idea being that the director has complete authorial control, like a writer would with a novel. Legendary film critic Pauline Kael balked against this idea, however. Kael believed that director trademarks that make a film ‘unique’ to that person are actually just a filmmaker who can only do one thing, and so they keep doing it whether it serves the project or not. I land somewhere in the middle on auteur theory. While I view filmmaking as a collaborative process, there is no denying that you know when you’re watching a Tarantino film. Wes Anderson is probably the most severe example of this. You can tell a Wes Anderson film in the first five minutes. For a while, this unique style was dizzying and innovative and often beautiful. In recent years, as Kael opined is inevitable, Anderson’s films have become a parody of themselves. Rushmore, Anderson’s second film, is one example where all of his quirks and foibles came together to create something wonderful…
Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a precocious 15-year-old at a prestigious private school in Houston, finds himself fighting for the affection of Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), one of his teachers, with Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a charismatic but melancholy industrialist. Blume initially takes Max under his wing, but the two soon become enemies.
Co-written with frequent collaborator Owen Wilson, Rushmore has the usual striking primary colours and particular use of framing (the characters are often shot as if on a stage – sometimes they literally are on a stage), but here, it serves to compliment the story rather than detract from it unlike in Anderson’s recent work.
While it’s easy to be cynical about the fact that out of the 1800 teenagers considered for the role of Max Fischer, it just happened to be Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew that got the gig, there is no denying Schwartzman’s performance here. He holds his own against Murray, no mean feat in and of itself, and delivers many of the film’s funniest lines with the same kind of detached irony that eventually became so tiresome in Anderson’s later work. It is surely one of the most iconic debut performances of the ’90s. Murray is exquisite, of course. He is the finest proponent of pathos since Chaplin, and he uses his natural mix of dry humour and deep sadness to great effect here. The soundtrack too is excellent (and unobtrusive).
While it’s frustrating to return to Rushmore now considering the trajectory of Anderson’s career in the context of what it could have been, it’s still a wonderfully innovative and eminently watchable film that will go down as one of the Texas director’s finest hours.
