Rushmore had more eccentricity and more heart than The Royal Tenenbaums. The main character is Max, played by Jason Schwartzman, a 15-year old scholarship student at a private school who ringleads theater, debate club, beekeeping, calligraphy, fencing, and other extracurricular activities, while on the verge of failing academically.
The character is a combination of precocious, pretentious, and naively awkward; he’s young enough to make lots of embarrasingly painful mistakes, and old enough to cause real damage. He makes friends with a middle-aged millionaire, played by Bill Murray in a midlife secondary-adolescent funk, and they vie with comic and occasionally life-threatening ferocity for the affections of an elementary school teacher.
In The Royal Tenenbaums, the characters’ eccentricities were mostly surface, with an internal anomie that was partly the point, and partly just dull. In Rushmore, the eccentricity dramatizes the typical adolescent desire to borrow an identitity through symbols — a school, a band, fashion; the heart lies in the traversing the path from the hero-worship to relationship.
Like the Tenenbaums, the psychological trajectory involves a main character who starts as a chronic liar and becomes just a little bit more honest. Rushmore’s Max doesn’t give up his wacky grand schemes, but is able to assimilate just a bit to reality; he admits that his dad is a barber, not a neurosurgeon, he dates a classmate who’s a fellow geek, he gets passing grades in public school.
The film has many great scenes; the crew breaking ground for an aquarium, above the protests of the baseball coach; a highschool play set in vietnam, with potted palms and explosions with dynamite; the main character’s preppy sidekick, having come to apologize, sitting in Max’s dad’s barber chair; Bill Murray, watching his wife flirt with a party guest, tossing golfballs into a pool.
For peterme: I really liked the move; and now understand why Jette would say good things about Wes Anderson.