Declassified: The Menace and Madness of "Art School Confidential"

Film: "Art School Confidential"
Written By: Daniel Clowes
Directed By: Terry Zwigoff


From its first frame, Terry Zwigoff's latest offering, "Art School Confidential," is a portrait of the artist as a pre-adolescent loser, then as a relative adolescent loser, and, in the Strathmore Art Institute, as an officially sanctioned an art school loser. Max Minghella's loveable Jerome Platz has an early passion for Picasso's art -- not just his fine art, but the art of his loins, or, rather, the artful territories Picasso's loins famously traversed. We can believe from the very first scenes at Jerome's expense -- those of traumatic elementary school bully beat-ups to moderately pretty girls passing him up for jockier beefcakes -- that this young man has some amount of depth to him. And it's true. To a point. That point of no return is, of course, where the film faulters into disappointment.

Jerome goes to art school and he's radiant with hope, as do we with him. He wants to be the world's greatest artist (!) and he wants to get girls, finally! His virginity is to do with taste, he tells his new roommates, an egomaniacal, index-toting director (played gruffly by Ethan Suplee "My Name is Earl" fame), and a fashion design student who will soon discover his homosexuality even though the audience already has. All the while, a scary strangler has been on the loose on the Strathmore campus; pretty gory stuff, from the likes of headlines. But Jerome, encumbered with a skilled hand, a longing heart, keeps his eye on the prize: a model from the Strathmore brochure. But before he gets to set his eyes on her porcelain skin, Jerome must be schooled in all that is not-so-confidential about art school. And that's where, I suspect, Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff had some fun. They leave the task to Bardo (brought to life by Joel Moore), a guy who's dropped out several times and come back to Strathmore, is our art archetype tourguide. He points out the holier-than-though vegan, the conceptualist, the butch lesbians, the suck-ups who've endlessly Googled their professors, the overly emotional Beatnik girls, the stuffed animal swaddling girls, the baby mamas who are still out looking for a good time, and the empty-nest moms who discover that their true calling is art. There's the failed professor, played excellently by John Malkovich, who's been perfecting triangles all of his life, and the Japanese ceramics teacher who just doesn't care. We get the art history professor -- in the form of the sizzling Angelica Houston -- who asks, pointedly, what is art during her first lecture; we discover a bastian of mediocre and sub-mediocre creativity. All these characters and characteristics populate Jerome's first days -- and Jerome, even with all the pre-fabricated possibilities, is difficult for Bardo to pin down. That is, we suspect, precisely why Bardo befriends him, and why we have too.

Jerome is initially difficult to pin down because there's an earnestness and interest about him that is soon to be corrupted. After meeting the down-and-out artist Jimmy (played rather miraculously by Jim Broadbent), he starts his descent into art world avarice. He meets the brochure model, Audrey (the beautiful Sophia Myles), befriends her, and almost gets with her until a frat-dude guy gets in the way -- with a really hip, pop, minimalist painting of an outline of a car on white, emanating from a flat yellow color field. The fascination with the painting is its now-ness and the fact that it conveys the artistic sensibility of a "guy who's never seen a painting in his life"! This gets Jerome's goat because he thinks that his figurative painting is eons better and that frat-boy's pulling the wool over everyone's eyes.

And here's the problem with the film: of course it's all parody and farce (beyond farce, even), but the art is all so bad! It seems almost inane to make this criticism in a film that's for a relatively popular audience, but it is because the art is bad that the culture can't be taken seriously enough. What adds fuel to this slow-burning, needlessly vindictive film is that it gives so little dignity to the art-making process that it willfully erases any kind of cultural import art has in our world. "Art School Confidential" gives us the most cynical maxim of them all: that art corrupts and that famous art corrupts famously.

To be sure, many have been turned off and torn down by the conceptually-addled art school curricula of our day, but taken to this extreme the notoriety of art school goes from being funny and well-observed to bitter. It's an object lesson in light-hearted revenge gone sour, and extremism in its most annoying, sardonic, and perfectly self-righteous form. Even a couple of appearances by the incomparable Steve Buscemi can't make this thing levitate. Unfortunately, by the time he shows up, everything's been disclosed, and all the things that could have gone wrong have been declassified.

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Others on "Art School Confidential": Roger Ebert, Scott Foundas, Carina Chocano, A.O. Scott, and the always-venerated David Edelstein.