Rushmore
dir: Wes Anderson
R, 93 min.
Now showing at area theaters
When I was in high school, the movies my friends and I hated most were the ones packaged for teens—decrepit low-budget sex comedies, hack ’n’ slash cheapies set on increasingly obscure holidays, pseudo-hip swill based on the trends of six months past. (My apologies to all partisans of Joysticks, Graduation Day, or Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.) What we resented most was the insulting mirror these movies held up to us. They said, in essence, “You kids are slack-jawed sheep, and you’ll buy anything we sell you.” To this day, whenever I see ads for the latest MTV-approved teen market-a-thon, I can feel the bile rising to the back of my throat.
If I’d seen Rushmore when I was 15, the age of its megalomaniacal hero Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), it would’ve been my favorite movie of all time, chiefly because of its protagonist. Max the overambitious, insecure teen entrepreneur is so precisely observed that he’s an instant archetype—the kind of kid who defensively tells a Harvard grad that Harvard is his back-up school, or who fails geometry because he’s too busy keeping bees and mounting a stage production of Serpico. A go-getter with zero tolerance for obstacles, he has everything except concern for others, and in the end, he gets that too; in fact, that turns out to be the missing piece that fits his profligate talents together. Who couldn’t love an odd-looking, bookish hero who triumphs in love, life, and drama club, without ever once suiting up for the football team or bribing a cheerleader for dates?
As it is, I love Rushmore so much I’m not willing to risk reviewing it to death. Suffice to say that it’s the rare American movie that treats teens as part of a larger world that extends beyond high school; that in the role of a lonely millionaire, Bill Murray has never seemed so touching; and that in addition to his sweetness and generosity of imagination, cowriter/director Wes Anderson has a gift for timed-release jokes that make you giggle at first and laugh out loud in retrospect. But I should probably add that I love Rushmore partially because it runs so counter to what teenagers are market-tested to like.
Especially now. At the moment, Rushmore’s competition for that lucrative 18-25 youth demo includes Jawbreaker, a vile Heathers clone about some popular high school girls who accidentally kill a friend and decide to make it look like a rape—this is a comedy—and She’s All That, in which “plain” teen artist Rachael Leigh Cook is persuaded by soccer jock Freddie Prinze Jr. to become a generic hottie. Jawbreaker alone sends a veritable Western Union of mixed messages, from anorexic body typing to snobbery, but both movies hold up bland normalcy as a holy grail. With their mall-bound fashions and radio-tailored soundtracks, they’re like the glossy magazines in John Carpenter’s They Live, which bear subliminal messages like “Conform!” and “Obey!”
Somehow Rushmore allows Max to become a better person and to succeed—for Wes Anderson, they’re synonymous—without losing his individuality or his ideas. Which makes it all the more galling that the senile MPAA has seen fit to slap Rushmore with an R rating that will keep the movie from viewers Max’s age—even though the coarser She’s All That has a kid-friendly PG-13. For this reason, I wish luck to Rachel Jrade and Emily McGrew, two teenage University School of Nashville students who are challenging the MPAA’s strictures regarding parental attendance at R-rated movies. Something tells me Max Fischer would approve.
—Jim Ridley
Bottled rocket
To moviemakers and moviegoers, there’s something irresistible about a kid with a dream—the more impossible the dream, the better. It’s a recipe for uplifting entertainment, with apple-pie-American values: No matter what your circumstances, you can be anything you want to be. Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys, about his boyhood yearning to work for the space program, has been turned into just this sort of movie, the cinematic equivalent of those orange-jacketed juvenile biographies of great Americans I read as a child. While October Sky punches through the Horatio Alger formula at times, more often its grasping fingers miss the heartstrings.
Adapting a true story into inspirational entertainment has the advantage of silencing the cynics with a defiant appeal to history, but it also has its perils. There are just too many juicy anecdotes and dramatic complications in Hickam’s book, and screenwriter Lewis Colick piles them on. Homer (Jake Gyllenhaal), a high school student in Coalwood, W. Va., is inspired by the 1957 launch of Sputnik to experiment with homemade rockets, along with three buddies (the jock, the wit, and the nerd). But he encounters opposition from his father (Chris Cooper), a miner who wants Homer to give up his college ambitions and accept his destiny in the coal pit.
With encouragement from a sympathetic teacher (Laura Dern), Homer and his team win their local science fair and vie for the attention of college admissions officers at the national level. A miner’s strike, an injury to Dad, a terminal illness for the teacher, and sabotage at the science fair are just a few of the numbing crises that afflict our hero on his way to the top.
If it weren’t for Gyllenhaal, a young actor with a wonderfully open face, and Cooper, who gives the stereotypical repressed ’50s father a believable edge, October Sky’s formula would plod from start to finish. As often happens in these fictionalized autobiographies, it’s only the home movies of the real-life Homer and his family playing over the credits that really get the chill-bumps going. October Sky is pretty good as a primer on the American dream, but we’re never in suspense about its happy ending. Strangely enough, Homer’s dream of space flight never seems as crazy as the scrawny hero’s dream of playing for Notre Dame in Rudy—a movie that has the same father-and-son themes, half the calculated pretension, and 10 times the power.
—Donna Bowman
Subhuman home-office blues
I once spent a few months working for a small publisher that was bought out by a much larger one, and on the eve of the takeover, we were addressed by one of our new corporate superiors. The woman’s speech was fairly innocuous until she closed with the line, “I know you come to work for the same reason I do—to work hard and make money for our shareholders.” Actually, of the many reasons why I went to the office every day, most involved making money for myself. The stockholders weren’t putting any chili in my bowl.
Mike Judge’s film Office Space deals with just this wage-slave malaise. Peter, the movie’s hero (played with laid-back charm by Ron Livingston), is a software engineer working in a featureless cubicle surrounded by motivational signs that encourage him to think of how he can help the company. His boss (Gary Cole) is of the “Can you do me a favor?” best-buddy school. One day, Peter decides to stop trying to be a model employee. Upper management, ill-equipped to handle open contempt, offers him a promotion.
Judge, best known for the animated landmarks Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, has a keen satirical eye, and he’s adept at capturing the overly polite affectations of white-collar language. Unfortunately, his vision is too narrow for the big screen; he would’ve served his material better had he hired a co-director, someone with more visual flair and a command of pacing. As it is, Office Space has an episodic structure and too much plot—it plays like a couple episodes of a TV sitcom.
Still, Judge has found a topic worth exploring in the indignities visited upon the victims of corporate nonchalance, and he explores it with more heart and compassion than the similarly themed Dilbert comic strip. Office Space’s sharpest bit of insight comes with the revisitation of an old high school guidance counselor exercise: Ask yourself what you would do with your day if you had a million dollars, and whatever it is, that should be your career. Peter says he’d do what many would do—sleep late, hang out by the lake all afternoon, and watch TV on the couch until he fell asleep. What would the stockholders make of that?
—Noel Murray
Hollywood & Vile
When David Rabe’s Hurlyburly hit the stage in 1984, it was praised for getting under the tanned skin of the yuppie decade and revealing the cold blood within. The new film version is decidedly less brutal, except on an audience expecting clarity. Maybe it’s the jarring transition of a very talky play from stage to screen—or maybe it’s that the ’80s no longer seem worth getting upset about—but Rabe’s once scathing portrait of venal Hollywood players is now quite tepid.
The performances are stellar—Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey are coked-up casting agents, Chazz Palminteri is their thuggish, childlike buddy, Garry Shandling is their insecure but well-connected benefactor, and Robin Wright Penn, Anna Paquin, and Meg Ryan are the women they mistreat. But the players’ constant hum is never attached to a memorable melody. Scene after scene consists of these game actors rattling off long, elliptical speeches about power, love, and personal integrity. Never once, though, do they bother to tell us who they actually are, or why they feel as out of it as they apparently do.
The film’s most vivid quality is its ability to capture that special, queasy feeling of being up too late and sharing your rawest feelings with a roomful of over-medicated people. But watching Hurlyburly is too often like watching a foreign film, with a tradition of stock characters with whom we are unfamiliar. A few electrifying moments aside, the incessant posing and absence of plot render it nearly incomprehensible.
—Noel Murray
The reel deal
Film critic Gene Siskel, one of the most recognized faces in a field marked by public anonymity, died this past weekend of complications related to brain surgery he had this past summer. Siskel began writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1969, at the age of 24. In 1975, he teamed up with Roger Ebert, his rival from the Chicago Sun-Times, to review movies on television. The ferocity of their arguments and their passion for cinema of all kinds—from the mainstream to the cultish—quickly made the duo into public icons.
One could argue the benefits of their life’s work, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve long been a fan, even when yelling at the TV in furious disagreement. Siskel was never the writer that many of his critical contemporaries were, but his opinions were most often valid and well-supported, and he was committed to popularizing challenging films. Admittedly, his critical faculties seemed to slip a little after his initial bout with cancer. He began giving more positive reviews to soft, saccharine films while withholding recommendations from edgier films for seemingly arbitrary reasons. At the time, I wrote an overly barbed column about the phenomenon; in retrospect, he must have had more important things on his mind.
Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge that Siskel’s top films of recent years—Hoop Dreams, Crumb, Fargo, The Ice Storm, and Babe: Pig in the City—were at or near the top of my own lists. Despite my occasional pokes at him, we agreed more often than not. Or, I should say, I agreed. We never met, but like many faithful viewers, I saw Siskel as a friend, sharing his heartfelt feelings right or wrong. I’ll miss judging him, as he so often—and so fairly—judged.
—Noel Murray
