Rushmore

(1998)

Creating and maintaining a diorama of worlds within worlds inside a film is extremely difficult for a director to achieve without getting lost in the process. Wes Anderson has certainly had this problem in many of his films but not RUSHMORE. The balance of nesting doll realities and emotional storytelling is exactly where it needs to be. The wants, needs, and intentions of characters are clear – and it is clear when those change – as they slip through various fictions, dreams, and fantasies. As in all of Anderson’s films to a greater or lesser extent, the tension is there between organization and art, literary and cinematic traditions, and the adult and child world. The deadpan expression associated with his oeuvre feels more like a sublimation of deep feeling than an absence of dimensionality in the characterization that has lately become his schtick. For the first and maybe one of the last times in the canon, we start with the archetypes and let the acting and writing breathe life into and twist them into something odd and genuinely unprecedented in drama. You find empathy for a man based on Mr. Moneybags from Monopoly and adopt the perspective of a sociopathic teenage under-achiever playing the part of a prodigy without any substance. Extremely good actors act like bad actors in the storyline and yet still take ownership of and receive redemption for their horrible mistakes. All this in at a time when high school comedies were the most meaningful movies Hollywood was producing.