Film Review: Speaking Truth to Poseurs

What does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?

Fall 2006 -- Art School Confidential. Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Matt Keeslar, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, and Anjelica Huston. Screenplay by Daniel Clowes. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. (United Artists/Sony Pictures Classics, 2006, Color, 102 min. MPAA Rating: R).

What does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?

Jerome Platz, artist in training, desperately wants to know. Jimmy, his mentor and drinking buddy, has the answer: “He lives only for that moment of narcotic bliss that only comes every decade, or once in a lifetime…perhaps, never at all.”

But the aging Jimmy—in a dour, virtuoso performance by British character actor Jim Broadbent—has extinguished his divine spark long ago, in a paper coffee cup of Slivovitz liquor. He is but one of many casualties strewn along the path of the cruel and unscrupulous world of postmodern art.

In this follow-up to their excellent 2001 sleeper Ghost World, director Terry Zwigoff and screenwriter Daniel Clowes (whose script for Art School Confidential is based on a feature from his comic book series, “Eightball”) follow Jerome’s ambitions and letdowns as a freshman art student. It’s a riotously dead-on satire that paints a contemptuous portrait of modern art pretensions.

Played with quiet determination by Max Minghella, Jerome is a shy, but very passionate boy who worships Picasso and aspires to become “the greatest artist of the twenty-first century.” Arriving at the venerable Strathmore Art Institute (modeled after Clowes’s alma mater, Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute), Jerome naïvely believes that all he must do to attain his dream is to hone his native talents, find his individual aesthetic style, and—voila!—his work will capture an eager audience among the tastemakers and trendsetters of the New York gallery scene.

But, he soon finds out—in a series of soul-crushing blows—that talent and vision don’t count nearly as much as creating insipidly empty pieces and latching onto the latest trite “gimmick.” Here, the movie hits its comedic stride, lampooning every bad art cliché. Jerome’s classes are peopled with a host of “rebel” caricatures: the manic-depressive beatnik chick; the “Vegan Holy Man” white Rastafarian; the shock “performance artist”; the sycophantic chameleon; and the blowhard who brags, in circular poststructuralese, that his inept art projects “have nothing to do with form or texture or color; they’re a conscious rejection of spatial dimensions…They’re more about the intimacy of the artistic process.”

His professors fare hardly better. Most are burnouts, and his drawing instructor, Professor Sandiford (played with a patronizing smirk by John Malkovich), is more concerned with his own exhibition career than in guiding students. When Jerome goes to him for help in seeking a vision, Sandiford tells him he’s too young to be so rigid as to have a style: he should experiment with all genres and media. So when Jerome follows the advice, working wildly divergent styles into his final project, he gets back the saboteur prof’s written critique: “Too experimental. Hollow and derivative. You need to be yourself.”

Jerome finds kinship only in a fellow student who keeps dropping in and out of classes (Joel David Moore), and in an art history teacher sympathetic to his predicament (Anjelica Huston). But the nascent artist discovers his true inspiration in Audrey (Sophia Myles), whose ethereal beauty and demure calm enthrall him.

The scene that intimately acquaints the viewer with Audrey, as she disrobes to model before Jerome’s drawing class, is the most sensuously evocative and graceful grand entrance I’ve seen since Kim Novak’s in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Jerome is captivated as she slowly reveals her nude body: Set to the string introduction from the adagio movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, the music evinces Jerome’s inner emotions for Audrey—not only sexually, but as the fulfillment of his quest for an ideal muse. Desirous of her, but also in love with her classical beauty, Jerome sees the otherworldly Audrey as she could be—a real-life Venus de Milo (which, if you’ve seen Sophia Myles, is not that far a stretch).

Sadly, Audrey resists Jerome’s awkward advances. Dejected by unrequited love, he realizes that he must be content to love only the idea of her.

At this point, a subplot about a serial strangler terrorizing the Strathmore campus takes over. Almost every review I’ve seen pans the subplot as gratuitous, or as running out of steam. I think they miss the method in Clowes’s and Zwigoff’s madness. As a plot device, it works perfectly in driving home the film’s message: The “fine arts” wasteland is so corrupt that the only way for Jerome to get his big break is to take the rap for the murders. Thus, through exploiting the biggest gimmick of all, Jerome finally is free to paint his ideal projects…in the Kafkaesque world of a prison, where he is locked up for crimes he didn’t commit.

What is intended as an essentially happy ending demonstrates a fundamentally bleak worldview. Audrey, having seen the error in her fickleness, finally commits to Jerome. In an understated closing shot, the two lovers at last engage in a passionate kiss—their lips partitioned by the wire-reinforced glass of a booth in the prison’s visiting area, to the strains of the Emperor’s Adagio. To Jerome, their passion still remains not fully realized, his Audrey still not fully within reach. The message is that artistic success and love are indeed attainable, but only by alienating oneself from the larger world.

This fatalism aside, however, the film is a spot-on satire in its scathing indictment of the backbiting, pettiness, haughty elitism, and sham that is today’s art. Art School Confidential is The Fountainhead meets Catcher in the Rye, realized by Mel Brooks. Bitingly it drives home its theme that, in today’s public arena of the absurd—where “controversial” artists vie to out-shock each other—beauty is truly the most controversial message of all.

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