WHEN LIFE GOES WRONG Hollywood gives us losers as heroes

Why does everybody like to identify with losers?
By JAY BOYAR
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Dewey Finn wants rock stardom so badly he tries to will it into existence.
High on the sounds of his guitar solo, the hero of "School of Rock" takes a leap of faith -- launching himself into the audience, fully expecting to crowd-surf to glory.
The crowd, however, isn't having any. And so, as the flabby, shaggy, shirtless Dewey thuds to the floor, he enters the ranks of Hollywood's loser heroes.
Sure, we usually prefer our movie heroes to look a bit more like Superman, say, or Charlie's Angels. Or 007. Or Indiana Jones. But we also reserve a place in our hearts for the washouts of the world.
"The nonhero hero is a staple of American film history," says film historian Jeanine Basinger, who chairs the film studies program at Wesleyan University. "It's been there since the beginning, and it's indigenous to our American ideas about ourselves."
For some reason, quite a few of these loser heroes have been popping up lately. In a faltering economy, perhaps it's no wonder that audiences are embracing underdogs of all breeds.
"People getting fired from jobs. Businesses closing down. What does that mean?" Basinger muses. "Maybe there is something subconscious."
A grunge guy
Leading the loser charge are grunge guys such as Jack Black's Dewey Finn.
"Like anyone we think is a loser, often they're just following some passion that is out of step with the functional, free-market world," says Richard Linklater, director of "School of Rock." "Dewey's sort of up against it. He's at the end of something."
Dewey is in the shabby tradition of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky, the mangy misfits of "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Magnificent Seven," the college screwups of "National Lampoon's Animal House" (especially John Belushi's Bluto Blutarsky) and their recent soulmates, the post-grad square pegs of "Old School."
Also in the grunge tradition is Harvey Pekar, the lowdown loser hero of the new "American Splendor." This grunge guy is an unkempt file clerk at a VA hospital in Cleveland who also writes an autobiographical comic book.
"He survived two bouts of cancer," says Shari Springer Berman, the biopic's co-director and co-writer, "dropping out of school, having a dead-end job, living in a fairly depressing city. He's sort of become this cultural icon."
They're just odd
Close kin to the grunge guys are the odd ducks.
Perhaps they're not as loud or rowdy or smelly, but they may be fundamentally weirder. Something inside them is so stubbornly strange that they feel like they'll never fit in.
Enid, the teenager played by Thora Birch in 2000's "Ghost World," is a quintessential odd duck. As we meet her, she has just made it through the trials of high school, mainly by hanging with her best and only friend, Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), and cracking private jokes about how lame everyone else was.
But now it's the summer after high school, and life is getting very real, very fast.
Rebecca is trying to reach beyond geekdom, but Enid can't bring herself to adapt. She finds herself increasingly alienated, painted into a corner by her own exacting, eccentric standards.
A character like Enid, Basinger notes, "appeals to our own sense of inadequacy." She's a latter-day version of Pookie Adams, the heartbreaking young misfit played by Liza Minnelli in 1969's "The Sterile Cuckoo."
One thing most of these odd ducks have in common is a heightened sense of personal style.
"They are presented as being more creative than the rest of us," says Basinger. "The subtext of that is always: Since they're not getting up and going to a big, corporate job, they have time to be creative and imaginative.
"They have the higher wisdom."
The sad ones
There's a fine line between the odd ducks and the sad sacks. The difference may be that, much of the time, the sad sacks half-believe they deserve what's coming to them.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has made a career of playing guys like that in such films as "Happiness" and "Love Liza," plays another one in the recent "Owning Mahowny."
As Dan Mahowny, he's an assistant bank manager with a serious gambling problem. The more Mahowny loses, the more pathetic he becomes. And yet we remain in his corner.
"I've watched it many times with audiences, and they're really urging him on," says Richard Kwietniowski, the film's director. "I think there's something quite universal about people getting caught up in something and losing perspective."
Adam Sandler often plays the sad sack, too, as in such films as this year's "Anger Management" and 1998's "The Wedding Singer."
His most memorable sad sack so far is found in last year's "Punch-Drunk Love" where, as businessman Barry Egan, he is ridiculed by his sisters and played for a fool by a phone-sex service.
A more serious, and unusually elegant, take on the sad sack is found in "Lost in Translation," which stars Bill Murray in what may be his most acclaimed role. Murray plays Bob Harris, a faded movie star who goes to Japan to be in a whiskey commercial.
A.O. Scott of The New York Times praises Murray's "subtle, aching, witty performance" as "a sad and solitary character" with an "unspoken history of success and eclipse."
"Everyone feels like a loner at some point in his or her life," Basinger explains.
"We feel like loners," she adds, "and we fear we're losers."