Sympathetic underdogs who can't stop losing

COURTESY TOUCHSTONE PICTURES Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is an acne-covered sex timebomb

Wes Anderson's Rushmore is an underdog film about underdogs, a story about the failure of grand gestures which makes plenty of its own along the way. It's the most empathetic movie in ages.

Diminutive, bespectacled Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is a 10th-grade scholarship student at Rushmore Academy, where he heads just about every club, including the Rushmore Beekeepers, the Bombardment Society (members play rousing games of dodgeball), and the Max Fischer Players, who produce Cliffs Notes versions of films like Serpico and Apocalypse Now. Max is also one of Rushmore's worst students, and when the film opens, he's in danger of flunking out. "I'll just have to pull some strings, I guess," he tells his chapel partner, Dirk (the wearily beautiful little Mason Gamble). It's a statement decidedly Fischerian in its combination of optimism, arrogance, and cluelessness. Plus, Max has two new projects absorbing his attention: an unlikely friendship with self-made local steel magnate Herman Blume (Bill Murray), and a deluded infatuation with a beautiful first-grade teacher, the widowed Miss Cross (Olivia Williams).

At first, neither adult seems particularly inclined to pursue a relationship with Max, but he earns their affections through sheer force of will: he peers at Blume through his car window with an expectant smile or faithfully attends Miss Cross with a pitcher of lemonade while she corrects papers. Blume is intrigued by Max's opaque, satisfied gaze and perplexed by his boundless creativity. The older man is the father of twins in Max's class--obnoxious, abhorrent brutes whom Blume hates almost as much as he hates himself. Max seems like another species, a self-realized young man who, as Blume says, has "got it all figured out."

But Max has never had occasion to figure out the ineffable intricacies of attraction and love; initiative, tenaciousness, and big productions have always gotten him what he wanted before, and he's angered that they don't work now. Blume aids and abets Max in his Model United Nations or yearbook-staff understanding of romance by funding the construction of an aquarium at Rushmore, in Miss Cross's honor. Since he's ripped up a baseball field to do it, Max gets expelled for building this testament to his unattainable love. This humiliation befalls him just about the time that Blume decides he's in love with the teacher, too; the lovelorn pair then commence a tit-for-tat game of revenge in which neither one knows when to stop losing.

Director and co-screenwriter Wes Anderson never condescends to Max even at his most petulant, or to Blume at his most sad-sack defeated. That might be why this very witty picture contains few gut-busting scenes: Anderson's sense of humor never goes for the cheap kill, and his characters' melancholy is so inextricably linked to their actions that every laugh carries a price. It is strange and unexpected, then, that Rushmore finally becomes uproariously funny toward its end, after Max and Blume have sunk into depression and resurfaced, and after Miss Cross's loneliness has been made all the more acute by the advances of men whom she cares for but does not want. Anderson's delightful use of jump-cut editing, sight gags, and whimsical camera angles increases as Max relearns how to fling himself headlong into the theatrical production that is his life.

Anderson's actors never make a false move. Schwartzman doesn't lift a finger to make the solipsistic, often repellent Max huggable, which keeps Max's character true even at the height of his adolescent fits of aggression. Williams invests Miss Cross with hard-earned flinty edges; in one startling exchange, the usually patient young teacher mocks Max for his callowness and inexperience in relentlessly corrosive terms. When was the last time you saw a movie's angelic vessel of ardor lash out at her pursuer in cruel, "masculine" fashion? When has an American film ever presented a pacific object of desire who admits that she's fucked before (Miss Cross's word choice), and that it wasn't a big deal?

The always marvelous Murray never oversells a line: he lets the script's language and his own body language do all the talking, so that the slightest lift of a brow or widening of the eyes can evoke a response. Murray provides the bumbling, eloquent, broken heart of Rushmore, due equally to the actor's gifts and his character's age; we know Blume is not as resilient as Max, that his failures and losses aren't as easily swept aside. Late in Rushmore, Blume stands in a hospital elevator, unclean and unkempt, sporting a shiner and two cigarettes. He tells Max, "I'm a little lonely these days." His tone is flat, as if he were speaking of the weather. As in much of Rushmore, one doesn't know where funny ends and sad begins. One wants to watch the film again and again, in the destined-to-fail hope of getting it figured out.

Back to A&E...