Week of May 11, 2006, Issue #551
FILM
Art School Confidential can't dry off from its perpetual wet blanket
PAUL MATWYCHUK / paul@vueweekly.com
When Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) enrols in the Strathmore Institute, his goal—as he’s pathetically fond of telling everyone he meets—is to become “the greatest artist of the 21st century.”Well, as anyone who’s ever attended art school could have predicted, it only takes Strathmore about a couple of months to beat all that idealism out of him.
It’s not that Jerome is untalented. The first few portraits he sketches in drawing class for his teacher, Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich), achieve the same well observed blend of realism and caricature you find in the work of Daniel Clowes, the comics artist who wrote Art School Confidential’s presumably semi-autobiographical script. The problem with Jerome—well, one of his problems, anyway—is that while he’s a perfectly competent draftsman, he’s definitely no genius, and he has no idea how to get anybody else to perceive him that way.
When a student named Jonah (Matt Keeslar) wows the class and Professor Sandiford with a childlike drawing of a sports car, Jerome can’t believe it; how did this guy, who can barely draw (who in fact looks like a jock who got lost on his way to the locker room and wandered into the studio by mistake), stumble onto the magic formula? It’s not that Jerome is bitter—he’s too innocent and unformed and inexperienced to be bitter. He just wishes he could hear the music that everyone else at Strathmore seems to be hearing. Even though he knows most of them are phonies and failures, he still craves their approval. If he can’t create something they like, how can he be sure he’s an artist?
Art School Confidential gets off to a good start with an early montage of freshman arriving for their first semester at Strathmore, none of them quite coming off as cool as they hope to. A black-clad, vaguely gothy girl tearfully clutches a stuffed panda as her parents drive off; a skateboarding dude tows a dorky wheeled suitcase behind him; a barefoot hippie chick steps on broken glass the moment her dad drops her off. Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff (who previously collaborated on the film version of Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World) are even better with the adult characters.
Malkovich gives a masterfully deadpan performance as Professor Sandiford, whose paintings of triangles are a quickly fading commodity on the art market. (“It took me 25 years to paint like this,” he boasts, completely without irony.) And Jim Broadbent is quietly terrifying as Jimmy, a middle-aged Strathmore grad who now sits in his filthy apartment, subsisting on nothing but slivovitz and a bottomless contempt for humanity.
But after a certain point, right around the time the fairly tedious serial-killer-on-campus subplot takes over the action, it feels as though Jimmy’s misanthropic spirit has infected the entire movie. This isn’t the zesty, take-no-prisoners misanthropy of Zwigoff’s previous film, Bad Santa, though; it’s a relentlessly dour “everything sucks” attitude that’s like a wet, heavy blanket thrown over every scene, smothering all the film’s humour.
The television series Six Feet Under explored this same milieu in its later seasons when Claire Fisher, the character played by Lauren Ambrose, enrolled in art school—like Jerome, she struggled with asshole teachers, formed rivalries with fellow students and constantly questioned whether she had any talent or was just fooling herself.
Claire was a frequently frustrating character, especially during the season when she tried to convince herself she was a lesbian, but unlike Jerome, you stayed with her because the show’s writers made her need to express herself so engaging, and you believed that she was capable of someday creating something great.
I bet if you asked Zwigoff and Clowes if any of the people in Art School Confidential could achieve greatness, they’d laugh in your face. The film just doesn’t allow for the possibility of artistic greatness existing in any of its characters, and as a result, it falls far short of achieving it itself. V
Opens Fri, May 12
Art School Confidential
Directed by Terry Zwigoff
Written by Daniel Clowes
Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, Matt Keeslar, John Malkovich