Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer very much enjoys his robust schedule of varied extra-curricular activities at the swish Rushmore Preparatory School, although it turns out his teachers are rather less impressed with his academic performance. Given a final warning to shape up or ship out, a plot arc that seems to be heading in an entirely conventional, Ferris Buller-esque way takes a sudden right turn when Max becomes, lets euphemistically say “romantically obsessed” with new teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams).
Further complications occur when his, let’s reduce this to friend, Bill Murray’s Herman Blume, a crumpled, lonely industrialist also takes a fancy to Rosemary, setting off a spiral of conflicts ranging from minor to stalkerific, culminating in Max’s booting from the the school he has so closely tied to his identity, and the loss of his few friends.
Max is, I find, a compelling character, at once far more adult and far more childish than the adults around him. He is by turns a really sympathetic character and a monster, grounded and wildly deluded but all of the time a fun character to watch. It also, I think, marked the first time I’d see Murray embody that sadly hollow, defeated character that he’s returned to time and time again over the past few decades with generally excellent results.
If there’s a flaw in the film it’s come more through my evolved understanding of women’s situation in modern life – it’s not that Max’s actions towards Rosemary were ever not seen as creepy and stalkery, but it was easier to understand Max’s actions as youthful hijinks, ultimately harmless, in an environment when there was less understanding of how threatening and demeaning “harmless” behaviour can be seen in a world where you can’t readily tell who the harmless and dangerous men are. That said, on returning to this for the first time in I don’t know how long, Williams does a very fine job of capturing this, I think, so perhaps it’s more a flaw with me than the film.
You could argue this is a film about a lot of things, but one that doesn’t say all that much about any of them. Obsession, relationships, class, identity, all get briefly landed on before flitting off to some other aspect, which is something perhaps common across all of Anderson’s work, but it’s no less fun for it. If you think you’ll be turned off by the quirkier aspects of his more recent work, then this would be a good entry point into his canon