Rushmore

The subtractive test finds a lean film and a compelled one. The clubs montage is not a decoration: it states the disease, a boy who has made a self from activities, and every later loss is subtraction from that list. The aquarium is required, since Max’s gift to Rosemary is the act that expels him, and its ruin on the baseball diamond sends him to Grover Cleveland. Bert the barber is required by Max’s lie about his father, and the barbershop is where Max goes to ground. Dirk carries the word that starts the war; Margaret Yang, dismissed and recovered, is the plot’s answer to Rosemary. What gives: three beats of the war could be two, Magnus is thinner than his screen time, and Blume’s marriage ends largely offstage.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and the film earns it through plot rather than mood. Precocity is the shape grief and class shame take; a boy who stages his life and a man who has stopped living his are the same wound at two ages. Max’s mother is dead and his father cuts hair, and both facts are hidden under productions, a blazer and a lie. Blume’s despair, a rich man who despises his own sons, is what Max will become if he wins. Rosemary, a widow keeping her husband’s room, is the third grieving figure and refuses both suitors on clear ground. What holds it short of the gate: the truth is gentle, the class subject touched more than pressed, and the cruelties forgiven fast.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The register is comic and rueful, and it rises at intervals. The heights: the opening montage cut to the Creation’s “Making Time”, where the comedy of a self assembled from clubs becomes something close to exhilaration; Blume alone at his sons’ birthday party, dropping into the pool and staying under, the film’s best image of despair; the war played as a pop opera to the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away”; and the last, the dancers after “Heaven and Hell” turning in slow motion to the Faces’ “Ooh La La” as the curtain draws across, an elevation earned by what was withheld before it. What holds the axis: the lift is almost always lyrical and comic and set to a record, the film rarely reaches terror or grandeur, and long stretches are level by design.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The patterns are present, and one of them carries the plot. The triangle is the oldest comic one, a boy and a father figure who want the same woman, and here it bears the weight of the whole: the plot is the rivalry of son and surrogate father, ended when the son gives the woman up and gives the father back his life. The orphaned boy who invents a grander parentage is the foundling of romance turned inside out, since his real father is better than the invented one. The school is a kingdom from which the prince is exiled and to which he returns as an artist, and Rosemary guarding a dead man’s room is the vow-bound lady. What holds it: these are worn lightly, and the particular stays particular.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The inheritance is the American teen and campus comedy, and behind it the boy hero of Salinger and of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), with Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) the nearest ancestor in tone. The turn is real and was first made here: a teen comedy played as a melancholy stage comedy, framed in proscenium compositions and divided by curtains, scored to British records of the 1960s rather than the charts of its year, its hero neither loser nor winner but a fifteen-year-old impresario, and Bill Murray, the broad comic star of the 1980s, played dead still as a ruined industrialist. The stake was high after Bottle Rocket (1996) failed commercially. The limit: the departure is a manner within a familiar story shape that resolves warmly.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Max lives his life as a production. The curtains that open on each month make the film one of his plays; the clubs montage is his own prospectus; the flat, frontal compositions are stage pictures, so that the world looks as Max would stage it. The form then carries the change. The war is staged as Max’s revenge plot and fails as theatre fails when its audience is real; the last play turns his staging outward, giving parts to Margaret, Magnus and Dirk, seating Blume and Rosemary together and dedicating itself to the two dead. The closing curtain is drawn by the film, no longer by Max. The cost: the Grover Cleveland and barbershop passages return to plainer grammar.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Twenty-eight years of return, with steady re-examination to show for it: a central place in the large and growing critical literature on its director, a Criterion edition, and a life in teaching. The questions stay open. Is Max admirable or a small tyrant, and does the film know the difference? Is Rosemary a person or a prize, a question Olivia Williams’s performance answers one way and the script’s economy another? What does the film think of class, when its scholarship boy wins back the rich school by art? Is the warm ending earned or simply granted? On return the frames reward attention, and the rhymes between Max and Blume multiply. What holds it: much of the return is to texture, music and performance.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 1990s, American independent and studio, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film found a manner, deadpan, frontal, curtain-framed and scored to old records, in which comedy and grief share one tone, and showed a new way to tilt the coming-of-age film toward melancholy and artifice, less a reorganisation of what film could do than the opening of a mode. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is large and demonstrable. The film made its director’s name and began the manner that became one of the most imitated in American film of the next two decades, in independent film and beyond it in advertising and television, and it began Bill Murray’s turn to deadpan melancholy. The limit: part of that reach belongs to the later films.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and surface across twenty-eight years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one version, with no altered cut replacing it, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous, on home video in every format, in a Criterion edition, in revival screenings, and in a following that has grown with its director’s reputation; it is steady presence, narrower than that of the most circulated films of its decade. The surface ages little: a private school, a barbershop and a steel company, dressed in timeless blazers and scored to music of the 1960s, are insulated from their own year by a deliberate anachronism. Twenty-eight years is a short demonstration, and the bar is met, not cleared.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Robert Yeoman’s anamorphic frames already show the centred, planimetric staging that became the director’s signature, used here with more looseness and life than later. The cutting of the montages, the clubs, the war and the slow-motion close, is exact, each built on a record. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, small and plucked, gives the school its tone. The performances are the making at its best: Jason Schwartzman, in his first film, carries arrogance and panic in one blank face; Murray’s stillness is a complete reinvention; Williams gives Rosemary weight the script leaves thin; Seymour Cassel makes Bert’s few scenes the moral centre. The costs: looser staging in places, and records sometimes lifting scenes the staging does not.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Max releasing bees into Blume’s hotel room and cutting his brakes, a cartoon war; and Max showing Blume his mother’s grave, quietly, in the cold. One law governs both: grief and wanting are converted into performance, and performance fails when it meets the real. The war is a play staged on a real man; the grave is the fact the plays were covering. The aquarium, the lie about his father, the stage version of Serpico and the last play obey the same law, and the ending resolves it by turning performance into a gift. The range is wide for a short comedy, from slapstick to mourning. The strain: the war brushes against a violence the film treats as weightless, and the reconciliation comes fast.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes holds. Max’s consciousness, seen from outside through his productions; a family as absence, a dead mother, and as quiet presence, a barber father; a second family, Blume’s, collapsing at its edges; a third, Rosemary’s, a widow and a dead man’s room; the school as an institution of class, with a scholarship boy, a headmaster and a public school across town; labour, in a barbershop and a steel company; art, in the plays; war, as Blume’s Vietnam and Max’s play about it; grief throughout. Each is a cause of the plot. What keeps the axis lowest: the state and history appear only as figure and memory, the natural order not at all, the sacred only in a chapel, and the world is one school, a town and a few houses.

Score: 6.8 / 10