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Rushmore (1998)
Sincerity Counts
I wasn't planning on this. I liked Bottle Rocket plenty, but was aware that Wes Anderson was a divisive director and that Rushmore would represent a very possible peak for his style. I was also aware that if I liked this movie, or, gasp, loved it, I would never escape the cloud of hipster-ism that would surely pop out of nowhere and provide woeful narration for the duration of my life. And yet... I loved it. Yup, I'm pretty sure that I loved Rushmore.
Now, I'm pretty sure I didn't like Max Fischer much at all. I mean, he's a little endearing, but also remarkably sinister, and oddly dark for a comedy. But then, Rushmore isn't like most comedies. I've been working on a rather far-fetched theory that the most enduring comedies all stem from an inner darkness, or depression (see Louie, Burn After Reading, etc.), and Rushmore certainly works that angle. Although Max and Herman's antics create a lot of comedy, they're rooted in an obsession (or is it devotion?) for love--Rosemary. She calls them children, I'll call them innocent--Herman obviously identifies with Max for his idealism and his spark, his imagination and his wit, and above all he identifies with Max's courage. Herman's cannonball is laugh-inducing, but also some form of suicide, some form of drowning. He's feeling a little lonely, and he wants to escape. Max's attempts to impress Rosemary are less depressed, but they reveal a manic and willful distortion of expectations and human interaction--he's a deeply disturbed little person, redeemed by a wild imagination and a frightening ability to love. Think of his obsessions before Rosemary: Rushmore, and his plays. And think of his explanation for going to Rushmore: "my mother saw my play and thought I should go to Rushmore." That must be grief, right?
Max's infatuation with Rosemary is a deeply uncomfortable plot device for a movie like this to carry on with, but it works because it all contributes to catharsis. Like the part in the play where the train zooms by, many significant moments in the movie are drenched in sound and represent a release--Anderson loves his songs, but they're also background noise to disguise the intensity of the movie, rather than to simply amplify it. Max's love of Rosemary also sets into motion him finally getting over his mother's death, and accepting his father's identity--Rosemary is similarly afflicted with a devotion to a dead person. And when Max identifies "a dead fingernail", he's come to terms with something inside him as well. One of my favorite interactions in the movie is when Margaret Yang interrupts him, and she reveals that she fudged her experiment results: "It didn't work. I thought it would, but it didn't, so I faked the results." Or something of that nature. In the end, Rushmore is about fakery, and about spectacle, and about how real life doesn't operate that way. But it's also about embracing that honesty (even in fakery) and allowing it to guide a person to maturity and acceptance. For a movie often derided as all style, Rushmore carries so much substance it kinda hurts.