Class Clowns

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

We tend to forget a couple of things about nerds. One is that despite their inability to dress for success, chat up girls or win the big homecoming game, they are often enviably--maddeningly--smart. The other is that their obsessiveness need not be confined to computer hacking. It can embrace--to take the convenient example of Max Fischer--fencing, beekeeping, astronomy, the dramatic arts and, alas, age-inappropriate lust.

Max, who is played with a sort of eerie solipsism by Jason Schwartzman, is the wearying scourge of Rushmore, a slightly tacky private school, and the ambiguous glory of Rushmore, a movie that Wes Anderson directed and co-wrote with Owen Wilson, and that may not be quite as lovable as they think it is. There does come a time when you wish someone would impose a long timeout on the indefatigable Max.

On the other hand, you have to admit that there is something brave about moving this character from the place where he usually lurks in the movies--on the comic-relief fringe of a teen-age gang--to the center of the action. You also have to admire the creepy arrogance of Schwartzman's performance. We can see that it covers loneliness, social ineptitude, even a certain amount of duplicity. His father is not the neurosurgeon he claims he is, but a barber. Yet the actor never once sues us for sympathy, and it comes as a nice surprise when we find it flowing toward him anyway.

Beyond that, you have to thank all concerned for giving that great minimalist, Bill Murray, his first good role since 1993's Groundhog Day. It's oxymoronically difficult to get laughs out of clinical depression, but as Blume, an industrialist driven to despair by his wealth, his wife and his ghastly children, Murray does it brilliantly. He's also the perfect foil for endlessly up-and-doing Max, who is, perhaps, everything Blume once was, all that he can no longer be. Their eccentricities speak to one another--until they both fall in love with pretty, wistful Miss Cross (Olivia Williams), a young widow who teaches first grade. At this point things fall apart. And to some degree so does the movie.

Expelled from school--you can't expect him to keep his grades up with all those extracurriculars nagging at him--Max goes ballistically obsessive in his passion for the teacher. And his friendship with Blume turns into a nasty, near murderous rivalry. Suddenly Max is no longer quite as adorable as we thought he was. And an often deft, frequently droll little movie turns into an increasingly desperate juggling act, first trying to keep too many dark and weighty emotional objects aloft, then trying to bring them back to hand in a graceful and satisfying way. The goodwill Rushmore has accumulated in its early passages is not entirely dissipated by this frenzy, but its concluding klutziness does rather spoil the fun.

--By Richard Schickel