By Jonathan Rosenbaum Top Top R ushmore has a good deal of content and human qualities to spare, but what makes it such a charming and satisfying experience is its style. Less obvious and functional but unmistakably style-driven is the fact that the curtains come in differ ent colors, giving another kind of lift to the proceedings. He's always a bit ridiculous, and so is Blume, but everyone in the movie is accorded a certain dignity that keeps him lovable. This dignity is often revealed in small but precious details. The bond that develops between Max and the millionaire degenerates into a protracted feud when Herman also falls in love with Rosemary after serving as go-between for his teenage pal.
Comparable gifts crop up in almost every scene.
Some involve Max's father, whose doting and nonjudgmental affection is undiminished by either Max's horrible grades or his defensive claims to Herman and his wealthier Rushmore classmates that his barber father is a neurosurgeon. This movie goes further by creating something more than a milieu and a circle of friends, widening its span to encompass a little world to contain them. This is perhaps the movie's most inspired wild card, though it also means that the world of the film begins at times to become infused with magical realism. Even if we accept Max's becoming best friends with Herman, the disaffected father of two of Max's classmates, we may balk when Max subsequently persuades Herman to spend eight of his ten million dollars on an aquarium designed to win Rosemary's admiration. To their credit, Anderson and Wilson share none of the class snobbery that subtly infuses much of Salinger's work, and though they don't harp on it, they seem to understand some of the less articulate forms of adolescent anguish that arguably make Booth Tarkington's Seventeen an even better evocation of teenage nightmare than The Catcher in the Rye .