Quiz Show.

The two white-collar workers, a man and a woman, slouch despondently near the office water cooler. In their despair they can hardly face each other, much less speak. No character from Beckett could express the sense of anomie these two radiate. They have arrived at some final, unclimbable wall that shuts off their view of the future forever.

Finally, the man speaks. "He was my hero." And the woman responds, "Yeah. Mine too."

I, eleven years old, sat watching these two characters on the TV screen and was utterly perplexed. Whom were they talking about?

My sister, fifteen years old and fairly hip, burst out laughing and nearly fell on the floor in her hilarity. She knew exactly who "he" was. Charles Van Doren.

The performers were Mike Nichols and Elaine May, still cabaret comedians in 1959 and the best ones around. Their skit was for a television "special" called "The Fabulous Fifties," and it must have seemed to more sophisticated viewers than myself like a comic tombstone for a decade. Only a few months earlier, Charles Van Doren, the bright, handsome college instructor had plummeted from national celebrity to national disgrace when investigations by the Manhattan district attorney and a congressional subcommittee, enthusiastically aided by an embittered former quiz "champion," Herbert Stempel, revealed that the show on which Van Doren triumphed had been rigged.

The Nichols and May office workers were only slight exaggerations Van Doren's most enthusiastic admirers: moderately well-educated, upwardly aspiring middlebrows whose hero embodied the romance of the intellect as surely as Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye represented the romance of the frontier and James Cagney the glamour of crime. And this hero had just confessed himself a fake. But the satire of the skit sought the correct target - not Van Doren himself but those in the audience who could swoon over nothing more than a lot of facts crammed into a handsome head. Americans are the most empirical of people and their heroes do strictly measurable feats: winning wars, space exploration, astronomical record sales. And what could be more measurable than giving all the right answers on a quiz show?

Those office workers are just about the only things missing from the Robert Redford/Paul Attanasio film, Quiz Show, for their movie is a marvel of multifariousness. I can't recall any other American movie of the past few years that touches upon so many facets of American life (as well as some universal themes) without losing sight of its central subject: how the lure of fame and money makes intellectual integrity seem very small potatoes.

Some of the facts:

The surging power of American life in the fifties and how much of it was concentrated in a New York City where bustle then had a hopefulness and (relative) lack of rancor nowadays sadly absent. The enthusiasm of the quiz show audiences is made, in this movie, to seem an effluvium of that optimistic bustle.

Then there is the only recently abandoned necessity to imagine the representative American hero in white Anglo-Saxon physical terms, even by those in the audience who aren't WASP. When the sponsor and producer of "Twenty-One" plot to replace the obviously Jewish Stempel with golden boy Van Doren, they are responding to their audience's dream, for dreams can be financial determinants. When the producer at first protests that Stempel is a hero to New Yorkers, a network boss snarls that "Queens isn't New York!" And, of course, the unspoken sequel to that statement is, "New York isn't the United States." These schlock merchants are trying to manufacture a hero for the nation, not the neighborhoods.

The conflict between a culture centered on literature and the fine arts and a nascent culture created by media is here exampled by the two Van Dorens, father and son. Charles's father, the revered man of letters, Mark Van Doren, can't imagine any better tribute than the ones paid him by his literary and academic peers and by his family (his wife was a playwright, his brother a famous historian). But his son, having achieved TV fans, deliberately times an entrance into a classroom building so that he will be mobbed by adoring female students. (He finds it less pleasurable to have a near-psychotic fan chase him down the street screaming for his autograph.) When the father hears that quiz shows are rigged, he sniffs that rigging such a thing is "like plagiarizing a comic book." But when he learns that his son (and fellow teacher at Columbia!) has participated in the scam, he collapses into a chair, half his face obscured by the bookbag on the table in front of him.

The victory of absorbed culture over ethnicity is also presented. The young congressional investigator, Richard Goodwin (like Stempel, Jewish; like Van Doren, Harvard) needs Stempel's testimony but he is also repelled by Herbert's nerdiness and monomaniacal resentments. Conversely, Goodwin strives to keep the clearly guilty Van Doren out of the line of inquiry because Charles's culture is one that the young lawyer has aspired to and mostly achieved: Harvard, literary talent, liberal politics. But when Goodwin's wife (also Jewish) learns that her husband is throwing Stempel to the investigatory wolves while shielding the Gentile Van Doren, she explodes, "Richard, you are the Uncle Tom of the Jews!"

This and much much more are dealt with in Quiz Show. By necessity, none of these themes can be examined in depth. Yet, the movie, if glib, is intelligently glib. Scriptwriter Attanasio and director Redford always find the right gesture, image, or phrase to express the point of each scene, even if they often move toward that point a little too hastily. Depths aren't plumbed but telling surfaces are achieved, linger in our minds, compel us to do our own probing.

The only drawback of what might be termed intelligent skimming is that it's just that - skimming. Paradoxically, this movie dissatisfies only when its writer, director, and actors are operating at the top of their bent. When you look at Paul Scofield's richly anguished face, you want to spend more time with Mark Van Doren, minor poet, major critic, and lovely father. When you hear John Turturro, as Stempel, complaining in a voice that first whines, then darkens into a snarl, and finally explodes into a howl of rage, you may remain grateful for Attanasio's intelligent writing, but you may also wish that Turturro would next work in an adaptation of Dostoevsky. (What a Smerdyakov he would be!) And when Ralph Fiennes, so appropriately repellent in Schindler's List but here unnervingly assured yet morally vacant, sees that Goodwin's faith in him has just crumbled and can respond with nothing more than a charmingly bland, "More coffee, Dick?" you may regret that the filmmakers haven't gone deeper into Charles Van Doren, if only to discover if something more than a gentlemanly abyss exists inside this man. (His final address to the senatorial panel does indicate some tragic self-awareness.)

But all the above complaining is nothing more than noting the defect of a virtue. If Attanasio and Redford had zeroed in on any one of their themes and probed it, the movie might have become a masterpiece, but it would not be the light-on-its-feet, bracingly panoramic delight that it is.