What happens when a man who can afford almost anything meets a boy who wants almost everything?

That may be the peculiar engine at the heart of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. Max Fisher and Herman Blume should have very little to say to each other. Max is fifteen, attending Rushmore Academy on scholarship and doing badly at nearly everything the school officially considers important. Blume is a wealthy industrialist with a successful business, a wife, two sons and all the visible evidence of having made it.

Yet almost immediately, they recognize something in each other.

Max has what Blume has lost.

Blume has what Max thinks he wants.

Bill Murray once described Max as “irrepressible,” and it is difficult to improve on the word. Max edits, directs, organizes, stages plays, starts clubs and invents projects with very little concern for whether he possesses the money, authority or competence required to accomplish them. When reality informs him that something cannot be done, he seems to regard this primarily as new information about the size of the production.

He is ridiculous because of this.

He is also magnificent because of it.

Reality is constantly trying to repress Max. He is fifteen. He is not rich. His grades are terrible. Miss Cross is an adult. Rushmore can expel him. An enormous aquarium cannot simply materialize because he has decided that one should exist.

Max absorbs these facts.

Then he has another idea.

Blume has the opposite problem. He has already acquired many of the things Max imagines adulthood is supposed to provide. He has money, status, authority, a family, a successful company.

And when we meet him, he appears to want almost nothing.

Anderson gives us an image that explains Blume better than a page of dialogue could. At his sons’ birthday party, Blume sits among the guests looking as though he has somehow ended up in the wrong man’s life. Then he gets into the swimming pool, sinks to the bottom and stays there.

It is funny.

Then it becomes sad.

Blume is drowning in a life that, viewed from outside, looks like success.

This is what makes his speech at Rushmore so revealing. He tells the scholarship students to take dead aim at the rich boys. Their fathers can buy them many things, but they cannot buy them backbone.

Blume knows something about what money can buy.

He has bought it.

The house, the position, the authority, the life that from the outside appears enviable—he has reached the destination. And he is sitting at the bottom of the swimming pool.

That makes Blume more than an image of the successful adult Max might someday become.

He is a warning sent back from Max’s imagined future.

Max thinks the problem is getting there.

Blume has gotten there.

And something essential is still missing.

Imagine, then, how Blume’s speech sounds to Max Fisher.

Max is a scholarship student whose father is a barber, although Max prefers to tell people he is a neurosurgeon. The lie is funny, but it tells us something important. Max desperately wants entry into a world whose values he also resists. He wants Rushmore’s prestige while insisting that he is more interesting than the privileged boys who inherited their place there.

Then this wealthy industrialist stands before him and says, in effect: You may not have their money, but money is not the final measure of a man.

It is almost exactly what Max needs to hear.

This is my guy.

And Blume soon makes a corresponding discovery about Max.

His own sons have inherited his privilege, but he seems to have little admiration for what they have become. Murray once described Blume, with startling bluntness, as a man who has “two kids he doesn’t like.” There is something almost taboo in the formulation. Parents are allowed to be disappointed in their children, angry with them, exhausted by them. Simply saying that a father does not like his children feels considerably more dangerous.

Then Blume meets somebody else’s child.

Max has inherited none of Blume’s advantages.

But he has backbone.

He has nerve, imagination, appetite. Above all, he possesses the mysterious ability to become excited by his own life.

Perhaps Blume does not merely see a promising student.

Perhaps he sees the boy he wishes had been his.

The aquarium makes their compatibility almost comically literal. Max imagines something enormous because Miss Cross likes fish. He cannot afford to build it.

Blume can.

Max has an idea he cannot finance. Blume has money and seemingly no idea what to do with it that would make his life feel less dead.

For a moment, each possesses exactly what the other lacks.

Max has desire without means. Blume has means without desire.

Put them together and something can happen.

That is why describing Blume simply as Max’s mentor does not quite capture their relationship. Blume certainly gives Max something. He gives him money, attention and, perhaps most importantly, recognition. For a boy who spends much of his life insisting that the world acknowledge the importance of Max Fisher, being taken seriously by a successful adult is no small gift.

Blume does not merely tolerate Max’s imagination.

He writes checks for it.

But Max gives Blume something too.

He wakes him up.

This may be the more interesting way to understand Miss Cross.

Max falls in love with her first and does so in the only way Max knows how to fall in love: extravagantly. Soon she is no longer simply a woman he admires. She becomes a project, a destiny, an organizing principle. Max starts reshaping the world around his desire for her.

Then Blume falls for her too.

There is no reason to assume that his attraction is insincere. But it is difficult not to notice that Blume begins pursuing Miss Cross after Max has reminded him what pursuing something looks like.

It is almost as though Blume borrows Max’s desire.

Perhaps he sees in Miss Cross an exit from the life in which he has been sinking: from his marriage, his disappointing family, his inert success. But the deeper attraction may be to the state Max inhabits so naturally—the state of wanting something enough to move toward it.

Max has reminded Blume that life can contain a next move.

Unfortunately, some of Max’s immaturity seems to come with the lesson.

The wealthy middle-aged industrialist soon finds himself engaged in an escalating revenge war with a fifteen-year-old boy.

This is where Rushmore becomes stranger than the familiar story of an older man guiding a gifted child.

A reasonable adult, confronted with Max’s romantic jealousy, would refuse the terms of battle. He would tell Max that he is fifteen, Miss Cross is an adult, and that is the end of the discussion.

Blume does something much more inappropriate and much more interesting.

He fights back.

Max retaliates against Blume. Blume retaliates against Max. Property, careers and reputations become weapons. The boy behaves like an aggrieved adult and the adult behaves like an aggrieved boy.

And somewhere inside this lunacy is a peculiar form of respect.

Max says, in effect: You are my opponent.

Blume answers: Very well.

Ah.

A worthy opponent.

It is terrible adult behavior and wonderful characterization.

Because Blume does not patronize Max even when he probably should. He grants him something close to dramatic equality. Max has spent his life demanding to be taken seriously, and now he has found an adult willing to take him seriously enough to become furious with him.

There may even be something exhilarating about the war for Blume.

Before Max, his life seemed defined by something worse than anger: indifference.

Now somebody can surprise him.

First Max delights him. Then Max enrages him. But delight and rage have something in common.

Both require engagement.

Max makes Blume care what happens next.

That is why asking whether Max and Blume are friends or opponents may be the wrong question. In Rushmore, friendship and rivalry grow from the same source. Each man recognizes the other as consequential.

Max looks at Blume and sees proof that an outsider with backbone can conquer the adult world.

Blume looks at Max and sees something stranger: proof that it is still possible to be excited by being alive.

Max wants access to Blume’s world.

Blume wants access to Max’s appetite for the world.

And neither can finally give the other what he imagines he needs.

Miss Cross cannot solve this problem either. Max cannot turn himself into an adult by convincing an adult woman to love him. Blume cannot escape his dissatisfaction simply by acquiring a new woman and a new romance. Both men have made the same mistake from opposite directions: they imagine that obtaining something will transform them into somebody else.

Both have to lose that fantasy.

This is why the final part of Rushmore is so moving. Max does not cease being Max. That would be too easy, and probably unbearable. He remains theatrical, ambitious and incapable of experiencing anything without somehow turning it into a production. His Vietnam play may be the most Max Fisher thing Max Fisher has ever done.

But reality has finally been allowed into the production.

His father can be a barber.

That sounds like a small thing, but for Max it is enormous.

He no longer needs to invent a neurosurgeon to make his father worthy of the world he wants to enter. The man who cuts hair can simply be his father. Miss Cross can be loved without being possessed. Margaret Yang can begin to exist as something more than a supporting character in the great Max Fisher drama.

Growing up, Rushmore suggests, does not require Max to stop imagining.

It requires him to understand that other people are not characters in his imagination.

Blume has changed too.

The man who began the film at the bottom of a swimming pool has been dragged, sometimes violently, back into participation. Max has not solved his life. Miss Cross has not solved it. Money certainly did not solve it.

But Blume is no longer quite so absent from his own existence.

And perhaps that is why their reconciliation matters more than either man’s romantic fate.

Underneath the aquarium, Miss Cross, the jealousy and the war, something genuine survives.

They like each other.

Not because either became what the other wanted him to be, but because each discovered something in the other that he could neither buy nor manufacture for himself.

The Jacques Cousteau quotation associated with Rushmore says that when a man has the chance to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

Whatever else may be said about Max Fisher, he certainly does not keep his life to himself.

He inflicts it on everybody.

He recruits people into it. He starts clubs. He stages plays. He proposes aquariums. He falls in love. He gets expelled. He declares war. He begins again.

His gift is not success.

It is the conviction that something else can always happen.

Blume, when we meet him, has almost the opposite problem. He has obtained nearly everything except a convincing answer to the question of what should happen next.

Then Max Fisher walks into his life.

One has almost nothing and cannot stop wanting.

The other has almost everything and has nearly forgotten how.

For a while they are mentor and protégé. Then friends. Then enemies. Then, absurdly, worthy opponents.

And eventually they become friends again.

When The Faces’ “Ooh La La” plays over the final dance, neither man has conquered the world, won the woman or discovered the secret of an extraordinary life.

But they have changed each other.

Max makes Blume want again.

Blume teaches Max something he never intended to teach him: that getting everything you thought you wanted is no guarantee that you will want the life you get.

One begins the film desperate to arrive.

The other has already arrived and is drowning in the pool.

Somewhere between them, Rushmore finds its bittersweet wisdom:

An extraordinary life may have less to do with getting what you want than with remaining capable of wanting something at all.