Art School Confidential is a difficult film to review.
By no means is it an abject failure. In fact, it is quite good overall, with moments of brilliance suggesting the movie that could have been. But the film is dragged down by a pair of conventional and predictable subplots that never quite fit. However, there’s a considerable amount of talent in Art School Confidential, both in front of and behind the camera, and their strong work elevates the movie above mediocrity. It’s just a shame that the problems with the screenplay weren’t ironed out before the cameras rolled.
The movie stars Max Minghella (the son of The English Patient director Anthony Minghella) as Jerome, a young art student fresh from high school, who is determined to be the next Picasso. Jerome enters art school hoping for a supportive environment filled with fascinating professors and students who can help him grow and develop as an artist. Unfortunately, he’s enrolled in an institution filled with untalented classmates who are either self-absorbed snobs or nutcases, and a faculty filled with failed artists who resent their students and merely kill time until the next paycheck.
While Minghella is stuck with a rather thankless “straight man” role (which he does well, but has little to do), the art school location provides a broad cast of eccentric comic characters brilliantly brought to life by a strong group of supporting players.
John Malkovich excels as a professor who recently discovered the art of painting the triangle after decades of work; Jim Broadbendt makes a humorous appearance as a failed art school graduate; Angelica Huston has a memorable cameo as one of the few supportive art professors; and Steve Buscemi appears uncredited as a whiny, weaselly art dealer while many other unknowns steal scenes as satirical caricatures of art school-types.
Art School Confidential is the fourth movie from Terry Zwigoff, who broke into the film industry with his amazing 1995 documentary Crumb, which followed the sad and strange life of underground comic illustrator Robert Crumb. Since that disturbing and often hilarious work, Zwigoff has made a career dedicated to comedies about bizarre characters living on the fringes of mainstream society.
He had a major commercial success in 2003 with Bad Santa, but is probably best remembered for his fiction filmmaking debut: the 2001 cult gem Ghost World. That melancholic comedy about two high school girls was a major critical success and earned Zwigoff an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. The script was a collaboration with cult comic book author Daniel Clowes (David Boring, Ice Haven), who wrote the original graphic novel on which the film was based.
Clowes has made a career writing about the same kinds of characters with whom Zwigoff so clearly identifies, and the pairing of the two made for a perfect match.
Art School Confidential reunites the Zwigoff and Clowes team, but unfortunately it does not live up to the lofty expectations set by their first film.
The problem with Art School Confidential can be traced back to the original source material. Although Ghost World was based on a full-length graphic novel that was easily translated to the screen, Art School Confidential came from a five-page comic strip mocking pretentious art school types. The comic was based on one joke, and while funny, it clearly could not be stretched to feature length.
Because of this, Clowes filled out his screenplay with a tired love story and a bizarre, out-of-place serial killer subplot.
Although both plots lead to a rather unexpected and satirical conclusion, neither feels completely developed; they mainly serve as loose connecting devices for the interesting characters and comedic set pieces (including an overly flirtatious male nude model).
Had Art School Confidential come before Ghost World, these issues could have been easily dismissed as failed experiments by a pair of first-time filmmakers, but by now, Zwigoff and Clowes should have noticed the problems in script.
Still, the conclusion of both plots works so well that you can tell the screenplay was only a draft or two away from working. All said, Art School Confidential is hardly a bad movie. Clowes has a unique sense of humour and character that transfers beautifully to the screen. Many scenes perfectly recapture the deadpan comic styling of Ghost World.
As a sum of its parts, Art School Confidential is a success, but the individual pieces fail to hold together as well as they should or could. And as out of place as the murder scenes feel—it’s never clear if they should be funny or scary—they are directed with a surprising level of visual experimentation that Zwigoff has never displayed before. Perhaps this movie was a necessary experiment for Clowes and Zwigoff before creating a new, more ambitious work, or maybe ideas that worked well on the page simply did not resonate on film. Regardless, while it may not be perfect, Art School Confidential still has more wit and originality in its best scenes than most Hollywood comedies manage in their entire running time.
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