Wes Anderson Week: Rushmore (1998)

filmosophy:

I WROTE A HIT PLAY AND DIRECTED IT, SO I’M NOT SWEATING IT EITHER

by Erica Ulstrom

Max Fischer may be Wes Anderson’s sweetest character.

Son of a barber (though he tells his prestigious private schoolmates he is a neurosurgeon) and a dead mother, enthusiastic Jack of All Extracurricular Trades.  Likely future cult leader, entrepreneur or coup d‘état organizer.

Max at 15 is larger than life and at the same time, socially and socio-economically insignificant enough to get lost in its cracks unless he rises and chooses to rage against that fate every day.

An impossibly young Jason Schwartzman plays Max, with all his quirk and tender intensity and insanity, perfectly.  Bill Murray’s Mr. Blume is good, but a bit of a dime story Virgin Mary candle to Max’s Christ the Redeemer statue thundering over Rio….or Rushmore, as the case may be.

I realized halfway through a recent viewing of Rushmore just what it is I love about Wes Anderson movies – other than the style, wit and imagination.  I love that the characters are slow and awkward; weird and uniquely broken. And how comforting, how heart clutchingly magnetic does that sound? Because I don’t know about you, but I am tired of saying the clever thing on dates and in meetings.  I would like to say nothing at all or too much and not have to measure and calibrate it all. To have courting be so simple as, “Yes, I’ll have one of your carrots.”  To just be my peculiar unrestrained self everywhere and never have to learn that sharing stories about the time your best friend forgot a very critical “L” in the title of a legislative report on “public health care” (which is hilarious, right?) too early will encourage a man to never respond to your email. Ever.  And not that that happened recently but it happened once and my heart is SO TIRED OF POISE, you know?  Ahem.

Anyhow, we meet Max as he is the reigning king - or at least administrator - of Rushmore. Captain and Founder of most clubs on campus.  Radical idea generator, director, playwright, bee keeper, debater, year book publisher, fencing enthusiast, wresting alternate.  Universally respected if not purely popular.

Max meets Mr. Blume – a school benefactor, businessman and unhappy father of beastly twin teenage sons – when he serves as the guest speaker in chapel, offering inappropriate, monotone advice on taking down the rich and well bred in society.

Max is captivated and a mentorship is born. Though it’s never entirely clear if the point is for Mr. Blume to coach Max on guerilla-success in business or for Max to teach Mr. Blume how to regenerate passion, purpose and well, Joie de vivre (as long as we’re using snooty foreign phrases).

Enter Mrs. Cross – the young, beautiful, English-accented grade school teacher Max falls unrestrainedly in love with over discussions of Jacques Cousteau quotes, Romance languages, and her drowned  husband.

Early on, we get the premise: Rushmore is both a cautionary tale on all the wrong forms of love and a gracious admission that we’re going to choose them anyway.  And it will be ok. We’ll find our way.

Max sets out to win the heart of Mrs. Cross with the same gusto and deafness to sense with which he approaches every school project.  For her, he mounts a successful petition to save Latin classes at Rushmore, raises funds to build a full saltwater aquarium on the school baseball diamond and eventually, is kicked out of Rushmore for this unapproved construction project.

In other words, Max loves Rushmore more than life, until he loves Mrs. Cross more than Rushmore and loses everything he values most – the adored school he’s attended on scholarship for ten years, his chance for a more illustrious life than his father – in the doomed pursuit of a woman he must understand he can never have.

“Has it ever crossed your mind that you’re far too young for me?” she asks Max at one point.

“It crossed my mind that you might consider that a probability, yeah,” Max says with his usual undefeatable confidence.

So oddly charming and driven is Max that you understand Mrs. Cross’s occasional waverings. The way she drifts and looks at him once in a while as if he might really be the clumsier reincarnate of her dead husband, Edward Applebee.

Inadvertently, Max brings the miserably married Mr. Blume together with the mourning Mrs. Cross – both having become his age-inappropriate friends.  And as we know it will, a sort of romance blossoms between the two (no pun intended).

And our next lesson becomes this: Which is worse?  Hopeless, intoxicating but unrequited love?  Or messy, ill-founded love that both parties suspect is damned from the start.

Rosemary Cross loves Edward Applebee, who is irretrievably gone.  And she loves Max and Mr. Blume each a little, despite the wrongness of each of them on legal, ethical and guilt-stricken grounds.

Max Fischer loves Mrs. Cross, whom he can’t have. His father, though he’s too ashamed to admit it.  And Rushmore, in whose safety he doesn’t yet realize he cannot remain forever.

Herman Blume can’t love himself, his sons or his wife, but is in love with the possibility of loving Mrs. Cross. Of loving anything again.

Max and Mr. Blume – who first loved each other in an odd strike of mutual identification – lose each other to jealousy.  Betray one another, sabotage a marriage, wreck a bike, cut break lines, burn each other’s lives to the ground.

Years ago, I saw Rushmore a half dozen times with a man I was head over sense in love with, despite the arrangement being wrong for 100 reasons.  Nobody ever laughed at Max Fischer like he did, no one ever got this movie and how sweet and brilliant and funny it is like he did.  I hated him for a while after we fell apart, but now he is married with kids and the thought of him cradling his stomach over this movie, repeating its lines in gasps - “NICE NURSE’S UNIFORM, GUY!” - makes me smile.   Makes me think of him so fondly and without any tie or expectation or heartbreak.  Now, in a much more distant way, we are friends again.

And that is exactly the point of Rushmore.

We’ll get it all wrong until we accidentally find our way to something right. And if we’re good to ourselves and each other in the process – if we can forgive and forgive and forgive – the pieces will keep shifting until something beautiful comes of the mess and we won’t have to sacrifice the ones that didn’t fit the way we needed them to.

We’ll just admire them from two pieces over, knowing we are both where we belong.

Erica Ulstrom writes, works in non-profit development, and plans travels from Minneapolis. She tumbls here.

My favorite.