Rushmore

Wes Anderson's second feature is a deadpan comedy of grand ambition, built around a prep-school overachiever who runs more extracurricular clubs than anyone can count and stages elaborate amateur plays. As a portrait of youthful arrogance and a showcase for the director's emerging signature — symmetric frames, obsessive detail, a 1960s British Invasion soundtrack deployed as emotional counterpoint — it is close to flawless. Jason Schwartzman, in his screen debut, turns the boy's self-important swagger into a fully lived comic creation, and Bill Murray's weary industrialist, sliding from bored amusement into something like real melancholy, is one of the great deadpan-dramatic performances of his career.

The film is less interested in plot than in character texture; the romantic triangle at its center — teenage prodigy, lonely millionaire, and a new first-grade teacher — mostly serves as the engine for a series of exquisitely rendered comic and wistful set pieces. That looseness is a feature for admirers and a fault for skeptics: the pacing is deliberately off-kilter, even slow, and the film's studied preciousness has been its most consistent criticism from the start. Some viewers find Max too abrasively smug to root for, and even among its champions there is a noted sense that the final act lets some air out of the earlier comic momentum.

Beneath the quirk lies an unusually honest study of loss and loneliness: a grieving kid performing adulthood, adults regressing into childish rivalry, everyone posturing to hide the same ache. That is why critics split — some read the film as light whimsy, others as a darker tragicomedy, and the bittersweet ending either lands as earned catharsis or, for a few, underwhelms. What nearly everyone agrees on is that it announced a major filmmaker and reignited a major actor, and that its influence on American comedy is everywhere.