Little to learn from 'Art School'

Cynical story doesn't get past stating the obvious

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, May 12, 2006

One truly great creation peers out from the gloomy disappointment that defines Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential. Meet Jimmy, an off-campus former student of Strathmore Institute, a fictional art college in New York City.

Jimmy is a fiftysomething painter who has achieved some success but whose main medium is the venom he spews at the occasional student who visits his ratty apartment. Debauched, slovenly and marinated in vodka, Jimmy (played by the great British actor James Broadbent) has spent years steeping his psyche in cynicism.

Presumably a former idealist, Jimmy is capable of tapping into deep reserves of self-righteous rage; he believes he's seen through to the rotten heart of the art world. He detests everything about it and has built up so much bile that his words sound as if they're being vomited rather than spoken.

But Jimmy also provides a clue as to where Art School Confidential goes wrong. Instead of being part of something telling and evocative, he's like a special effect dropped into a movie that's full of minor observations expressed in a minor key, almost an in joke.

Zwigoff and comic-book writer Daniel Clowes, who joined forces on the far superior Ghost World, are smart guys, so it's no surprise that they display convincing knowledge of art-school types. And they show a particular skill at sketching caricatures: the professor (John Malkovich) who has spent years developing his art to the point where he thinks he's found his ultimate statement - insipid triangles painted on flat backgrounds - or students who can't distinguish between originality and incompetence.

But the movie is a bit of a cheat. When it comes to degree of difficulty, exposing the pretensions of the art world hardly ranks as a gargantuan task. And it certainly doesn't take much insight to tell us that, in our sensation-driven culture, notoriety often trumps talent.

To unify the movie's slashing, derisive strokes, Zwigoff and Clowes devise a weak story about a serial killer who's terrorizing the campus. Zwigoff doesn't seem to realize that an episodic approach probably would have sufficed; at times, he tips the movie perilously close to teen comedy, only this time it's art students who occupy the cinematic dormitory.

Zwigoff (Crumb, Ghost World, Bad Santa) builds the movie around Jerome (Max Minghella), a nave first-year student who dreams of making it big in the art world.

Jerome, who has demonstrable drawing talent, has convinced himself that artistic success will enable him to win the sexual favors of beautiful women, a theory he tests on Audrey (Sophia Myles), a girl who models in his figure-drawing class.

Some of the characters feel as if they've been added to flesh out the movie's fringes.

Steve Buscemi, for example, runs the off-campus restaurant where an art show can be a steppingstone to acceptance at a major gallery. Joel David Moore portrays Bardo, a perpetual student whose major skill involves identifying the women with whom Jerome could score if he were less picky.

Zwigoff and Clowes clearly don't have a high opinion of art school, but once they've told us that the place is loaded with hollow, phony fools, what's left to say? The crudest of all the students, by the way, is an aspiring filmmaker (Ethan Surplee) who's trying to make a feature with his grandfather's money.

By the end, it feels as if Zwigoff and Clowes skimmed through a sketchbook without figuring out how to make a fully realized painting, a task that might have mattered less had the movie been either thematically more ambitious or more consistently funny.

Art School Confidential boils down to this: The emperor otherwise known as the "art world" has no clothes.

That raises a question for which Zwigoff provides no compelling answer: If it's all so vile, empty and hypocritical, why waste a whole movie on it?

Art School Confidential stakes out its cynical claim in the first 15 minutes and never really gets beyond it.