director
Terry Zwigoff
screenwriter
Daniel
Clowes
based on
his comics story
producers
Daniel Clowes
Lianne Halfon
John Malkovich
Russell Smith
music
David Kitay
cinematographer
Jamie Anderson
editor
Robert Hoffman
cast
Max Minghella (Jerome)
Sophia Myles (Audrey)
Matt Keeslar (Jonah)
John Malkovich (Prof. Sandiford)
Jim Broadbent (Jimmy)
Anjelica Huston (Sophie)
Joel Moore (Bardo)
Michael Lerner (Art Dealer)
Jeremy Guskin (Eno)
Katherine Moennig (Candace)
Jack Ong (Prof. Okamura)
Monika Ramnath (Flower)
Ethan Suplee (Vince)
Steve Buscemi (Broadway Bob)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 102m
u.s.
release: 5/6/06
video
availability: TBA
official website
other terry
zwigoff films
reviewed on this website:
- bad
santa
- crumb
- ghost
world
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Even though film critics aren't
directly attacked in Art School Confidential, the
movie's paltry 37% (as of this writing) approval rating at Rotten
Tomatoes makes me wonder if a lot of critics feel stung by
it in some way. In part, the movie presents art as a scam, and
the various satellites of art (dealers, professors) as even more
pathetic than the would-be artists. That may hit a little too
close to home for film critics who like to think of themselves
as more than barnacles on the side of an industry. Maybe, too,
they were expecting something more like 2001's Ghost
World, the previous collaboration between director
Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes. That would be the age-old
fallacy: If a director gives the critics more of what they liked,
he's rehashing himself; if he does something different, it's
not as good as what they liked before. I feel like writing Movie
Critics Confidential.
In any event, you're reading
one critic who enjoyed Art School Confidential quite a
bit, and part of the credit has to go to professional misanthrope
Daniel Clowes, whose four-page comics story of the same title
is a tiny masterpiece of vindictive venom sprayed at all the
phonies and wannabes he observed as an art student. The film
version, which necessarily expands on the comic and shackles
it to a murder mystery, is possibly Clowes' comment on movies
based on comics. Some critics feel the film derails itself by
engaging in a lurid mystery plot -- the Strathmore Strangler
haunting the streets near a scraggly art school. But Clowes does
lurid like no one else (flip through his graphic novel Like
a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron), and even the plot's conventional
aspects bring out a crime-is-art subtext that might make John
Waters smirk in recognition.
Max Minghella is the Candide-like
lead, Jerome, a freshman who idolizes Picasso and wants to be
"the greatest artist of the 21st century." Jerome is
the only person onscreen with any particular talent or passion
for art; most of his classmates are poseurs -- already masters
of academic bullshit -- and most of his professors (including
John Malkovich as a fey life-drawing teacher) care more about
securing gallery showings for themselves and justifying their
budgets. Art School Confidential, it must be said,
is a pretty harsh argument against supporting the arts
-- an insider's sneer at the pomposity and self-regard of the
system. Zwigoff and Clowes obviously have nothing against art
itself, though -- they just can't abide the people who try to
turn it into plastic and profit off it.
If the movie has a genuine
voice, it's that of Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), a washed-up alcoholic
painter who reminded me of Robert Crumb's housebound brother
Charles in Zwigoff's great documentary Crumb.
Being taken to see Jimmy, and hearing his withering negative
take on art school, art itself, and life itself, is a freshman's
rite of passage. Moldering in his squalid city apartment, Jimmy
is the voice of Zwigoff, assuring us that it's all hopeless and
meaningless and there's no sense even trying. He's one of several
suspects in the strangling case, as is a jock type (Matt Keeslar)
whose primitive renderings of cars and tanks are praised by professor
and students alike as a refreshing gesture away from the usual
pretentious art-school fumblings.
Art School Confidential has contempt for the fake and for
those who deal in it and fall for it. Zwigoff's send-up of artsy
film-student stuff (courtesy of wannabe director Ethan Suplee)
is pitch-perfect, a bookend piece for his "Mirror, Father,
Mirror" in Ghost World. The filmmakers do
honor the truthful artistic impulse to render a thing of beauty
-- Jerome is transfixed by life model Audrey (Sophia Myles),
herself a product of the art system who yearns for honest
art and not just an ironic appropriation of art, like her father's
pop art. Jerome represents unfaked talent and artistic sensibility,
so of course everyone in the movie looks at him as if he were
from Mars. In the end, the film has placed him in the perfect
position to succeed on the system's corrupt terms. Art School
Confidential is a finely honed work of misanthropy that all
but a few art professors and easily offended film critics will
enjoy.
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