Art School Confidential (2006)

2 months ago

Art School Confidential (2006)

by Andrew Root

The best way to see a movie is with low expectations; if it turns out to be great, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If it’s an uneven, forced mess of a statement without a significant story or likeable characters, then you’ll feel justified in your initial prediction. I’m here to tell you that I feel extremely justified in my low expectations ofArt School Confidential. Just by looking at the two trailers that were produced for this film (which play up wildly different angles of the story), it becomes clear that no one knew how to best handle this uneven mess. Trailer One: becoming an artist is silly and pointless and we should derive humour from the foibles of art students; Trailer Two: there’s a serial killer loose on campus, you guys! Sadly, the film fails to deliver on either of these premises and instead shoehorns them together so awkwardly that I may have shouted at the screen… more than once.

The film is based on a comic by Daniel Clowes (who also wrote the screenplay, and is perhaps more fondly remembered as the creator of Ghost World) which - at only four pages long - was entered as filler in a larger piece he was working on. It was a satirical commentary on art schools in general, and the charmingly(?) neurotic and dysfunctional personalities who voluntarily attend such institutes. It proved so popular with art students, and so accurate at skewering the foibles of the overly self-serious Art World denizens, that it became something of a niche phenomenon, each reader claiming that it was based on their particular art school. The problem is that it’s a niche which is incredibly hard to open up to the everyday viewer. Who knows these people? Is it accurate? Should we care? Unlike Ghost World (Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff’s previous collaboration), which focused on the existential void left by high school graduation, not everyone can relate to this particular subject matter.

It’d be great if I could offer a concise plot synopsis, but there is no way to succinctly summarize a movie with this many characters and with this disparate a plot. Essentially, it centers around a young artist who suffers a philosophical breakdown when he realizes that his talent is not enough to gain him the respect and idolization to which he feels he’s entitled.

Things I left out of this synopsis:

1. Falling in love with the nude model.

2. The nude model’s issues with her father and former girlfriend.

3. The serial killer.

4. Angelica Huston.

5. The undercover police officer.

6. The café/art gallery owned by Steve Buscemi.

7. The deadly apartment fire.

8. John Malkovich.

The convoluted plot constantly mashes together incongruous elements, made worse by the obscure stock characters (which ostensibly would be recognizable to anyone who’s gone to an art school) who are either given too much attention from the story or not enough. For example, when Matthew (Nick Swardson), the fashion major, is introduced – sitting primly on the edge of the bed, inspecting his impeccably folded pastel and khaki wardrobe – he radiates stereotypical homosexual tendencies. The talk about “really, really missing [his] girlfriend” only causes the viewer to exclaim, “No. He’s gay. He’s really, obviously, painfully gay.” Why do the filmmakers wait 75 minutes and then spend a four minute scene on his “confession” that he’s gay? He’s a minor supporting character who adds nothing to the plot. Why make us wait for a foregone character revelation? Meanwhile, the nude model’s spiky past, and the damage she’s doing to the people who truly love her is tantalizingly dangled before us only to be snatched away in favour of more scenes of Ethan Suplee swearing at his grandfather.

The “Secretly Gay Guy” is only one of this film’s Andre-the-Giant-sized handful of openly embraced archetypes and clichés (in fact, there’s an early scene in which one character discusses the fact that everyone in the class [if not the school] fits into an easily identifiable category):

The Bully
The Hack-y Film Student (with Reservoir Dogs and Apocalypse Now posters on his wall)
The Vegan Holy Man (dreadlocks and a didgeridoo)
The Boring Blowhard
The Angry Lesbian
The Kiss Ass
The Mom
The Dropout
The Guy Who Never Got Laid in High School
The “Art Skanks” (a term liberally used to mean any female who attend art college)
The Beautiful Beatnik (who is secretly crazy)
The Nice Innocent Suburban Girl (who is secretly crazy)
The Nympho Slut (literally her name in the script)
The Dream Girl
The Arrogant Successful Guy
The Bitter Old Man
The Jock (who is literally wearing a football jersey and eating a turkey leg with his hands)

Max Minghella, son of the late Anthony Minghella, plays the central character Jerome, aka The Class Douchebag (and scarcely has a title been more deserved). We’re meant to identify with Jerome’s blindingly pure motives (at one point he admits to remaining a virgin because he has very high standards) and idealistic goals (to be “the best artist of the 21st century”), but these attributes work against the protagonist on a few different levels. He’s a talented artist, but it gains him nothing—and it’s usually motivated by the promise of either scoring with a pretty girl or earning fame and fortune. He’s so idealistic, it’s abrasive; and it doesn’t help that Minghella’s style of acting is thoroughly annoying (open-mouthed, eyes darting back and forth).

But the biggest problem lies with the fact that Jerome is deeply deluded. Given his virginal status and terrible flirtation style, his Dream Girl is likely the first girl he’s ever seen undressed, and in a Titanic-esque sketching scene he labours over capturing her true essence. From Jerome’s perspective, the scene is all slow cross-fades and weepy violin music. From reality’s perspective, it’s peppered with masturbation jokes and a jaded model who’s “dying for a cigarette.” Jerome sees a girl who is stunned to silence by his artistic rendering of her. We see a woman who is amused (and slightly embarrassed) by a boy spending an inordinate amount of time shading her neckline. His failure to grasp the reality of almost every single scenario he’s included in leads him to make decisions that no one in the audience would make.

Without a substantial central character, this movie falls apart. Jerome isn’t an artist. He’s a fake. He’s got a bit of talent, and he’s mad that the world hasn’t handed itself to him. He’s got a serious problem with entitlement, and therefore not only do we not care about him, we can’t believe anything he says or does. The audience can’t derive any truth of experience from him or empathize with his struggles, because… well, because fuck that guy. He’s a liar. He lies to himself, and in so doing, becomes an enemy of art. He thinks he’s as good as he’ll ever need to be, and what artist truly thinks that?

As the film progresses, Jerome isn’t praised for his original artistic attempts, so he switches styles and techniques radically, copying students whose results he abhors and derides as amateurish. Jerome’s downhill spiral continues to the point where he steals someone else’s paintings and attempts to pass them off as his own. When that ploy earns him only the scorn of his classmates (whose opinion he claims to despise), the only thing the audience feels is annoyance. It’s tiring to realize that we will have to sit through yet another scene in which Jerome tries and fails to cope without immediate, effortless success. The archetypal character of The Desperate Failure may be an art school staple, but it does not make for a likeable (or even tolerable) main character.

If Art School Confidential offers insight into the art world (as the title seems to claim it will), it’s not overt. It’s difficult to determine the dramatic thrust of the film, perhaps because there really isn’t one. It’s a character-based send-up and, like the source material, it’s heavy on premise but thin on delivery. Everyone should know by now that it’s no easy feat to be an artist, but Zwigoff and Clowes set out to make the experience appear as unpleasant and unsatisfying as possible.