Rushmore Introduced the World to Wes Anderson (and Reintroduced Bill Murray)

Wes Anderson has certainly had a productive year. He released his Asteroid City earlier this year and, just a few months ago, he dropped a quartet of short films on Netflix, based on short stories by Roald Dahl. Personally, I prefer the short films to Asteroid City, a film that even had an Anderson fan like myself wondering, “What the hell was that all about?” In Asteroid City, Anderson had longtime collaborator Jason Schwartzman play a recently widowed dad (and the ambitious actor who plays him). It’s kind of wild watching Schwartzman as a bearded, graying adult in an Anderson film, especially when he made his big-screen debut as a teenage overachiever in Anderson’s breakout movie Rushmore, which came out 25 years ago this month.

Schwartzman, the 17-year-old then-drummer for Phantom Planet (AKA the band behind “California,” the theme from The O.C.) and offspring of Hollywood royalty (his mom is Talia Shire, which means Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle and Nicolas Cage and Sofia Coppola are his cousins), was just the right person to play private-school kid Max Fischer, whom Anderson once described as “a fifteen-year-old Mick Jagger.”

Despite having lousy grades at Rushmore Academy (“He’s one of the worst students we’ve got,” the headmaster—a pre-Succession Brian Cox—says), he’s practically the resident BMOC, strolling through the school halls rocking braces, Buddy Holly specs and his trademark prep-school jacket. He’s a beast when it comes to extracurricular activities (which are all listed in this hard-rocking montage), either serving as a member or president of the myriad school groups. His prized baby is the Max Fischer Players, a repertory theater company that puts on elaborate productions like a stage version of Serpico.

Fischer is all pasty-faced swagger, having such magnetic rizz (I believe that’s Gen-Z slang for “charisma”) that even classmates’ parents find him charming. He gains a mentor/buddy in Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a rich industrialist with a cheating wife and twin sons he can’t stand. Their friendship turns to animosity when both gents have eyes for Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), a fetching English teacher at Rushmore. The two men engage in a rowdy battle of revenge that predictably becomes them just ruining the lives of each other and themselves. 

Anderson obviously modeled Fischer on several young, male, lovelorn movie protagonists who are too ambitious and naïve for their own good: Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, Bud Cort’s Harold Chasen in Harold and Maude, Noah Taylor’s Danny Embling in Flirting. You even get a whiff of the cocky guys Tom Cruise played in the ‘80s. But Fischer is also a stand-in for Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson, two Texas pals who’ve done time at prep schools. Anderson also shot the film at his ol’ alma mater, the St. John’s School, in his hometown of Houston. (The Houston Cinema Arts Festival recently held a 25th anniversary screening at the school.)

Shot in anamorphic widescreen by cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Rushmore launched Anderson’s career as an original, American filmmaker on the rise. Anderson cribbed from many brilliant guys to create Rushmore’s artfully designed world: Jean-Luc Godard, Hans Holbein, Charles Schultz (Anderson also called Fischer “a cross between Charlie Brown and Snoopy”). He hired Devo frontman (and famed geek) Mark Mothersbaugh to do the score, but he also rounded up a soundtrack of ‘60s and ‘70s British invasion hits, making the film’s aesthetic feel like it belongs in the era of such hippy-dippy counterculture auteurs as Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky and British New Wave director Lindsay Anderson. (Rushmore does seem an eventually positive version of Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic boarding-school drama If….)

Rushmore also gave Murray’s career a boost. After Rushmore, the SNL alumni-turned-comedy movie star became known as a bonafide Legitimate Actor, playing middle-aged characters who are—to quote a line he said in his directorial debut Quick Change—the crying-on-the-inside kind, I guess. He perfectly captures midlife malaise in a memorable scene where he quietly boozes it up at a family pool party, literally throwing golf balls in the deep end before taking a huge dive with a lit cigarette dangling in his mouth. Not only did Murray go on to make many films with Anderson, he also starred in films from fellow acclaimed auteurs Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch. 

Even before Rushmore was released in theaters (it did an Oscar-eligibility run in New York and Los Angeles before getting a proper theatrical rollout two months later), critics were gushing over it. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram’s Elvis Mitchell liked it so much, he reviewed it not once, but twice. Matt Zoller Seitz, a Dallas film writer who would later go on to chronicle Anderson’s filmography with The Wes Anderson Collection, was immediately a fan. “There are few perfect films; Rushmore is one of them,” is how Seitz began the Rushmore chapter of Collection, also adding “it’s jam-packed with artifice and foregrounds most of it; yet the sum feels singular and furiously alive.” Not all critics were won over; Michael Sragow said watching it “would be like reading an article called ‘Why Adolescents Need Prozac.’”

I have to admit that, when I saw it so many years ago in my younger days, I was a bit suspicious of the positive onslaught for a film—about a weird little shit who goes on a rampage when he can’t get his very own Mrs. Robinson—that I thought was just OK. But, after revisiting the movie now that I’m old as hell (I’m in my late 40s, but it’s the same damn thing), I see how Rushmore is an exaggerated yet authentic portrait of lonely, brokenhearted people. High atop the list is Fischer, a kid who may present himself as a high-class mover and a fixer, but is really a middle-class kid with a dead mother he misses and a barber father (the late Seymour Cassel) he’d rather people not know about.

Rushmore ends with a beautifully rendered vision of adolescent life. It’s a slo-mo wide shot of a dance floor full of joyfulness, fireworks and some bittersweet reconciliation and acceptance, all set to Faces’ “Ooh La La.” “I wish that I knew what I know now / When I was younger,” Ronnie Wood sings in the chorus, most likely echoing the sentiments of Fischer and many characters in the shot, as well as the director. Released right before teen movies like She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You and the raunchy AF American Pie became all the rage, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore gave us a coming-of-age tale that’s surreal, romantic and, somehow, more honest than all those films.

Craig D. Lindsey is a Houston-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @unclecrizzle.