Rushmore

Screening: 14 March, 6:30pm

USA
1998

Director: Wes Anderson
Production co: Touchstone Pictures
Producers: Barry Mendel, Paul Schiff
Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson
Cinematography: Robert Yeoman
Editor: David Moritz
Production designer: David Wasco
Music: Mark Mothersbaugh
Max Fisher: Jason Schwartzman
Herman Blume: Bill Murray
Rosemary Cross: Olivia Williams
Bert Fisher: Seymour Cassel
Dr Guggenheim: Brian Cox
Dirk Calloway: Mason Gamble
Margaret Yang: Sara Tanaka
Magnus Buchan: Stephen McCole
Mrs Calloway: Connie Nielsen
Dr Peter Flynn: Luke Wilson
93 mins
16mm (2.35:1)
M cert

The season's wittiest, most original, and best-written portrait of the artist as a young (very young) man is surely Wes Anderson's Rushmore, a distinctively dry, droll, and ludicrous romance with an impressively high "huh?" factor.

Anderson, who with his fellow Texan writing-partner Owen Wilson, scored a mild triumph in their 1996 Bottle Rocket has an evident fondness for skewed genre expectations and obsessive personalities. Rushmore, which is an even less classifiable tall tale than its predecessor, celebrates a character whom a good percentage of the audience would probably love to beat up a ferocious 15-year-old go-getter named Max Fischer.

Bill Murray has been widely praised for his superb shambling walk-through, but Anderson also gets an unexpectedly sweet performance from the often too-wired Seymour Cassell as Max's father. (Although the senior Fischer is a barber, his son routinely upgrades his profession to brain surgeon.) There are also vivid turns from a trio of young performers Sara Tanaka as Max's female counterpart, Mason Gamble as his squeaky-voiced "chapel partner," and Stephen McCole as his Scottish nemesis. But Rushmore is most dependent on Jason Schwartzman's portrayal of the stubborn, obnoxious, pompous, theatrical, ingenious, horny, and persistent Max.

Cheerfully stylised, Rushmore pretends to be a kid's film and perhaps it is at least insofar as the kid in question grew up to make the movie. The story of Max's education is a charming tale of loss and obsession and, as the title suggests, some sort of monument. The motto it recalls is "The child is father to the man."

J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 10/2/99

Internet Movie Database listing

With the short film:

A Sense of History

UK
1992

Director: Mike Leigh
Screenplay: Jim Broadbent
28 mins
35mm

So convincing is Jim Broadbent's performance in his sly satirical monologue that for the first 10 minutes you believe the voice you are hearing really is the drawl of the 23rd Earl of an ancient English family, striding about his 10,000 acres, recounting his history with pride. But what at first seems an admirable sense of noblesse oblige is little by little revealed as arrogance of the most loathsome kind.

Details from Film Festival Screening