Rushmore (1998)

Directed by Wes Anderson. Starring Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Brian Cox, Mason Gamble, Seymour Cassel, Sara Tanaka, Stephen McCole, Luke Wilson, Marietta Marich. [R]

Fifteen-year-old Rushmore Academy student Max Fischer (Schwartzman) is a bright and peculiar iconoclast, as involved in extracurriculars as he is in himself, and is, according to the long-suffering dean, “one of the worst students we’ve got.” He forms an unlikely kinship with a quirky industrialist (Murray), develops a hopeless schoolboy crush on a first-grade teacher (Williams), and then feels betrayed when romance blossoms between his new friend and his infatuation. Wes Anderson’s sophomore feature remains his funniest effort to date, all the while he experiments with the formal, heightened-reality aesthetic that would become his creative calling card (the slo-mo pans and New Wave montages are starting to shape up, while pastels were still in his future). You can also sense the filmmaker still trying to find the specifics of his voice—influences of The Graduate and Harold and Maude (among others) are consistently felt—but the dialogue is so precise and the characters so detailed and droll, it already feels like we’re living in his shadow box dioramas. Fearlessly riding the line between incorrigible and despicable, Schwartzman has still never been better on film (his feature acting debut, to boot), Williams layers shyness and delicacy on top of her sharp intellect, and Oscar-snub Murray is a deadpan delight every time he’s onscreen. First-rate soundtrack compiles classic (but not overplayed) pop tracks from the 60s and 70s interspersed with original compositions from Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh. Owen Wilson co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson, but he only appears briefly in a photograph; Connie Nielsen has a small role.

85/100