Wes Anderson, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker -- and I, for one, would argue that they're plentiful -- has developed a justified reputation as a consummate crafter of motion picture soundtracks. Unlike other directors who simply leave it to the judgment of whoever's writing the score to make sure sound and vision are properly attuned, with a complementary mood and tone, Anderson personally supervises the selection of the music that goes into his films, painstakingly matching existing songs and original scoring to make sure every scene is perfectly matched, that viewers not only see what he wants them to see, but hears what he wants them to hear. This gift of blending original music, extant pop music artifacts, and film is one that he shares with a handful of other directors of a distinctly post-modernist bent: Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and the grandaddy of them all, Martin Scorsese. All four men have a positive passion for blending rock, pop and other musical forms into a lively mix and then folding them delicately into their movies. Tarantino, the consummate pastiche artist, may be the most adept at this form of cinematic mix-tape, but Wes Anderson may be the most inspired, and both musically and cinematically, Rushmore is his masterpiece.
For a movie as distinctly modern as Rushmore is, it has a curiously archaic quality. The music borrowed from other sources is intensely retro; the finished product sounds like a mix CD put together by a quirkily aggressive friend who's obsessed with the music of the British invasion. And while that might seem pretty odd for a movie about a kid who came of age in the late 1990s, it's less odd than it might seem once you've seen Rushmore: Max Fisher is undoubtedly one of those insufferable kids who's utterly scornful of any band containing people close to him in age, and ostentatiously listens only to music that was composed before the invention of the cassette tape. In the album's liner notes, Anderson claims that he originally wanted the soundtrack to contain nothing more than Kinks songs, but a combination of legal issues and the pleading of his collaborators made him change his mind. It's probably for the best -- such an extravagant gesture would be too relentlessly outre, more in keeping with Anderson's later, crazily idiosyncratic work than Rushmore, a movie that keeps a relatable and recognizable human heart beating beneath its ironic hipster exterior. And while Quentin Tarantino might have cast Bill Murray as some sort of flamboyant bit of revivalism, Anderson, here, does it because Murray is the only actor who can deliver the blend of sly, wicked humor and melacholy that is reflected in the soundtrack.
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