In case anyone reading this blog has not yet seen this movie (and I suspect this number is small), I recommend Rushmore (1998, Wes Anderson) enthusiastically and without reservation.

Update: We watched it again tonight for the first time in a couple of years. The film is set in 1997, and yet I have always had the sense that the date of the film is ambiguous, and is meant to take place about ten years earlier.

The protagonist, Max Fischer, is 15 during the action of the film. Max attends Rushmore from 1985 until 1997, gaining admittance at age 3 or 4 for writing "a little one-act play about Watergate". His mother dies in 1989.

If we subtract ten years from all of the above dates, the background of the film seems to make just as much sense. Max would have written the Watergate play soon after the event, instead of during the Reagan administration. Note the paper that Herman Blume is reading his speech from in the chapel scene: it appears to have been typed on an electric typewriter, not printed on an ink-jet printer. The cars and bicycles shown in the film seem to fit into a late-80s setting, and I don't remember seeing a single computer screen or laptop in the whole movie.

Herman mangles Max's sport-touring bicycle, and Max reverts to riding a woman's three-speed bike with an internal hub gear and a child seat on the back - his mother's old bike, and of a style common to the late 60s or early-70s. Dirk Calloway's bike is a red racing-style bike, something one would expect an eight-year-old to have in the mid-1980s, but would be unusual by 1997.