Rushmore is my favorite Wes Anderson film. He’s written three with Owen Wilson to date (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums), and I pray they’ll get together again soon. At its heart, Rushmore is a film about social classes and friendship. The protagonist, Max, isn’t that likeable. He’s a narcissist is the truest sense of the word, yet somehow the writers make him so colorful, so full of life, we can’t help but root for him.
Mark Twain used his adolescent hero to provide an outsider’s viewpoint on a rapidly stratifying American society, a republican dream pulling apart into divisions of age, income and race. Rushmore is also about class divisions—Max, the son of the local barber (Seymour Cassel), is attending the exclusive school on a scholarship—but Anderson and co-writer Owen Wilson, more wishful thinkers than Twain, use comedy to imagine the healing of those divisions, the reweaving of relationships across the lines of class and generation. 1
In the near future, this site will post screenplay analysis on Rushmore. There’s a lot more I can say about it, but for now, we’ll just have to be excited with the news that Criterion will finally release the Blu-ray of Rushmore in November. Criterion puts more care into their releases than any other distributor. You won’t find cleaner transfers anywhere else, not to mention, the bonus features alone are worth the extra price you pay.
Rushmore Criterion Blu-ray Features:
WES ANDERSON-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION INCLUDES…
- New high-definition digital transfer of the director’s cut supervised by director Wes Anderson
- Audio commentary by Anderson, cowriter Owen Wilson, and actor Jason Schwartzman
The Making of “Rushmore,” an exclusive behind-the-scenes documentary by Eric Chase Anderson- Max Fischer Players Present: Theatrical “adaptations” of Armageddon, Out of Sight, and The Truman Show, staged for the 1999 MTV Movie Awards
- Episode of The Charlie Rose Show featuring Anderson and actor Bill Murray
- Cast audition footage
- Wes Anderson’s hand-drawn storyboards, plus a film-to-storyboard comparison
- Props, posters, behind-the-scenes photos, and other graphic ephemera
- Original theatrical trailer
- Collectible poster
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film critic Dave Kehr
Criterion will release their Rushmore Blu-ray on November 22, 2011 (perhaps they chose the date because the film was also shot in Texas). To pre-order a copy, click here to be redirected to Amazon.com.
