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‘I am elated each time I watch': why Rushmore is my feelgood movie

‘I am elated each time I watch': why Rushmore is my feelgood movie

The Guardian21-07-2025
'Let's hope it's got a happy ending,' Herman Blume, played by Bill Murray in one of his best roles, says near the end of Wes Anderson's 1998 film Rushmore. He makes the remark about an over-the-top, literally pyrotechnic school play that his teenage friend Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) has just debuted to an audience of dazed teachers and parents. But his comment stands in for the whole movie, an audacious and risky comedy that should not work, but does. I am elated each time I watch this poignant, wise and wildly funny film – and, yes, there is a happy ending.
Rushmore is about children trying to act like adults and adults acting like children. Fischer is a precocious scholarship student at Rushmore, a prestigious private boys' school. He is the sort of bright but naive young person who tries to impress an adult by telling them, with a straight face, that he plans to apply to Oxford and the Sorbonne for university, with Harvard as a 'safety.' In fact, Fischer spends more time planning lavish plays and starting school clubs than studying. He is one of the school's 'worst students,' his headmaster (Brian Cox) sighs.
One day Fischer meets Blume, a local industrialist whose sons are students at Rushmore. Blume is a self-hating rich man – his loathing of his boorish, silver-spoon-fed sons is one of the film's many funny running jokes – and he takes a shine to the scrappy Fischer. Despite their difference in age, the two develop a sincere and surprisingly equal friendship.
A wrench is thrown into their bromance when Fischer meets Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), a new teacher at Rushmore and a recent widow, and develops a powerful crush. In addition to the obvious hurdles – he is a child, and she is not interested – his friend Blume becomes smitten, as well. (Talking to Fischer by cellphone, Blume tries to talk him out of his crush on Rosemary. 'I mean, she's not that beautiful. She's not that intriguing,' he argues, as the camera pans to reveal that he is spying on her through a classroom window.) The two friends spiral into an infantile battle for Rosemary's attention – without, in classic male fashion, having given much thought to her feelings.
A love triangle (sort of) between two adults and a teenager is an odd, even uncomfortable, premise for a movie. Rushmore's protagonist, Fischer, is also frankly a bad person: a shameless operator who manipulates people, subjects the exasperated Rosemary to grand and misguided romantic gestures, and acts ruthlessly to realize his overambitious projects. (Perhaps Anderson is trying to tell us something about auteur filmmakers?) There's a version of Rushmore that reads like Fatal Attraction; it is a testament to the film's intelligence that it instead bubbles over with charm, warmth, and emotional observation.
I first watched Rushmore in high school, when I was old enough to appreciate the movie but not really to fully understand it. It was recommended by a friend who had a touch of Fischer to him, and perhaps saw a touch in me, too. Watching the movie, I had a strange shock of recognition: not just 'Where has this been all my life?' but 'How is it that some people I've never met made something perfectly tailored to my sensibilities?' Of course, a good film offers more, not less, each time you watch it. I've come back to Rushmore again and again, and each time I catch things – jokes, call-backs, themes, smart symmetries and flourishes – that I hadn't noticed before.
The film is the best of Anderson's quirky vision, without an overindulgence in the aspects of his style that can be grating or 'twee,' to cite a common criticism. One reason may be the contribution of the actor Owen Wilson, who co-wrote Anderson's first three films (including another fan favorite, The Royal Tenenbaums). I suspect he balanced Anderson's whimsy with a certain groundedness and emotionality. Rushmore is stamped with the famous Anderson aesthetic, but its characters and story also have a realness that his more recent work sometimes lacks.
As entertainment, the film gives me sheer pleasure. Yet it is also a profoundly shrewd study of relationships, ego, and growing up, whose emotional maturity is all the more impressive given that Anderson and Wilson started writing it when they were still in their twenties. And the film's iconic soundtrack of British Invasion pop-rock is perfectly chosen, none more so than in the final scene. As characters dance sweetly to Faces' Ooh La La, the lyrics offer a summation: 'I wish that I knew what I know now … When I was younger.'
Rushmore is available on Hoopla in the US or to rent digitally in the UK and Australia
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The story spread beyond Vice, and was picked up by other news outlets, and one branded Kari the 'Hipster Grifter'. According to Kari, she 'enjoyed that [she] was stirring s*** up'. She added that to her, her victims 'very much represented, to me, the kind of people that I grew up with - all of these white guys who were objectifying and fetishizing me'. She added that while that didn't justify her conning them, there were occasions where she had not planned to swindle anyone, but then had done after they made 'triggering' comments, like: 'I've never had an Asian girl before.' After the story broke, a man she had met several days before at the launch of a DVD texted her and offered to help, saying she could lay low by staying at his place. He promised he wouldn't give her up to the authorities, then sent a car, so she could travel to his home. However, she said: 'When I get there, immediately he answers the door, pulls me in, and starts kissing me. And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa! We never talked about this, we never agreed to this. This is not something that I'm wanting to do. I'm going to get out of here."' Kari added: 'And it was essentially a situation where it was like, "Well, you're already here, you're in my place, I'm offering these things, and what's going to stop me from calling the authorities on you now?"' She thought 'this guy has a lot of stuff, like, there's me thinking, "OK, if I'm going to do this, I obviously have to make this worth my while"'. The man she was staying with had 'a thing for infamous people', and wanted her to provide some unusual services for him - like reading articles about herself while he pleasured himself. Setting a two-article limit, she agreed to it. According to Kari, when reading the articles, she became indignant about factual errors in them. Going to bed in what was a second bedroom/office space, she thought to herself: 'What am I doing? I'd rather go live in a roach-infested apartment rather than here with this weirdo.' While there, she decided to make the most of it, and scoured the room for items to steal - including a paperweight, thumb drive, and book of checks. Refusing to name the man, she revealed that he's now a 'person of note' - a business man who's disrupted an industry, and whose name's known in America. She realized 'something has to give', as her limited options were limited to living in a roach-infested apartment or in this spare room - 'neither of which were the most palatable'. Kari said: 'I did want to take care of it. I wanted it to be over. Basically, I took a bus to Philadelphia and was met by several police officers who arrested me, and so I was in a Philadelphia detention center for about 30 days until the State of Utah sent two detectives to handcuff me and put me on a plane to fly me back [there].' She said that in total, she spent around a year incarcerated, and now feels she is totally reformed. Kari explained: 'I truly believe that I will never go back. I will never be incarcerated again. But the parts of me that are reformed are not [reformed] because I went to jail. 'It's 1,000 per cent because of the people I met there, and all of these amazing women who I saw, who have just been completely knocked down and are there's no way for them to get back up. 'There's no way to, you know "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" if you don't even have boots to begin with.' Going on to describe the stress of living with her lies and manipulations, she said: 'I am a queer woman, so my entire life, I felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, that I was going to be caught, and that I was running away from something - and that I was bad. 'So it certainly was a heightened version of that, but it was not that uncommon from all the feelings I had had my entire life up until that point.' Opening up about why she had lied to and conned people, Kari said: 'The best that I can give is because of, at the time, my own insecurities, and my own ego, and my own confusion around who I am as a person. 'And now, it's a double-edged sword having a story like this. So, in finding that people are interested in what I have to say, it feels like a disservice to not utilize that in some way, toward moving the needle toward a more compassionate society in some way.'

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