Upper Crust High

Rushmore and She's All That

viewed October 25, 1999 on video

After I watched Rushmore and She's All That in one fell four-hour swoop I took a much-needed walk around the old neighborhood.  I entered Sellick Park, an profoundly uninspiring stretch of grassy knolls where I have passed many hours jogging mindlessly on its oval walkway.  I stopped along this walkway when approaching a very large contingency of young Asians occupying half of the parkland.  Feeling intimidated and antisocial (that's what movies do to you), I sat on a bench and observed the tail-end of their picnic from a distance.  Young girls lying on the grass with their feet lazily swaying above their thighs were watching the guys play football; the older kids were responsibly cleaning up the tables and carrying food back to the parking lot.  The thuggish boys who were too cool to play sports stood around in their down jackets, while more conventionally dressed young ladies approached them and disarmed them with farewell hugs.  None of what I was seeing had any resemblance to the teenagers in Rushmore or She's All That.  There are many reasons for this, most notably socioeconomic ones, and it will be left to somebody to get normal, working class kids represented on the big screen.  In the meantime we have to settle for the utopian renderings of high school life witnessed in the two subjects of this review; though I wonder if I'd have been just as entertained watching the picnic.  

Although both movies present a utopian campus setting for their adolescent subjects, they both make motions to challenge the notion of perfection in high school; both campuses seem conceived from the minds of overachievers, albeit radically different ones.  The campus in She's All That seems far more fragmented and cliquish, which creates the conflict in the main character, Zack, played blandly by Freddie Prinze Jr. Upon losing his girlfriend to a Real World reject, Zack makes a bet that he can transform any girl into the prom queen.  Enter Laney Boggs, a talented though morbid and introverted art student, played by Rachel Leigh Cook like a cut-rate, Heathers-era Winona Ryder.  In trying to connect their disparate worlds, Zack dabbles with his artistic, spontaneous side (just a little though), and Rachel learns how to assert herself among the callously cool.  The divisions seem generic and contrived to begin with, but perhaps they're manifestations of characters' cliquish mindset, similar to how Rushmore Academy seems to be presented through the eyes of its protoagonist, Max Fischer.  Through Max's perspective, aspects of school life such as academics and study hall are virtually absent, while the things that matter (extracurricular activities, having a personal underclass servant) have hyperbolic significance.  Max seems to be an object lesson of knowing at an early age what really matters in life: not studying, but schmoozing.  

Between the two films, Rushmore is far more successful at critiquing the private school system and the effects on its students psyche.  This is because it doesn't duplicitously exploit the glamour of privileged adolescent life, which is a major flaw of She's All That.  Zack has everything going for him: valedictorian, soccer team captain, choice of any college, and yet he feels too much pressure from his success.  He is not his own man: he's afraid to send in his college acceptance letter for fear that he'll not send that of his father's alma mater. This is a generic conflict, but still the most interesting among a handful of tepid subplots; unfortunately by the end Zack still hasn't been shoved from the track of success, which would have made his character a lot more interesting.   

Max does get shoved big time from his boarding school bough, but that's neither the most perceptive or entertaining part of Rushmore.  The movie hits its stride when Max is running the school full force.  Whether it's the montage of Max's extracuriculars (Rushmore Beekeeping Society, for instance) or his petitioning to remove Latin from the curriculum, then having it reinstated when his beloved teacher Miss Cross casually mentions it, you get the sense of the invincibility that big teenage fish feel in small high school ponds, as well as a not-too inaccurate vision of how well-endowed schools haphazardly allocate their funds.  Max's moping through the second half of the movie is not nearly as poignant, nor is the wacky but pointless final production near the conclusion.

It is worth noting that both films feature a child with a motherless family, raised only by a working-class father with good-intentions but to regarded less with authority than with a condescending sympathy.  Essentially, these kids are on their own, and what results are teens who are smart, pop-culture savvy and emotionally shallow.  At least Rushmore has the consideration to kick Max out of his territory and have him do a little soul-searching as he fends for himself in public school.  The characters in She's All That float through their petty self-image melodrama to whatever step is next on their cushioned stepladder of success; maybe, hopefully, they'll experience a fall worth filming.

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