Search for a film:

 

May 14, 2006

Art School Confidential

Asshole Confidential

By Andrew

Back in the suburbs for Mother's Day weekend, I caught Terry Zwigoff's new film Art School Confidential while my mother and sister marked the holiday with an afternoon of shopping. In preparation, I wandered Alderwood Mall before show time, remembering director Zwigoff's penchant for casting malls as the backdrops of his comedies; for instance, the mega-mall in Bad Santa, the strip mall in Ghost World.

Overwhelming, awe-inspiring, and more than a little sad, the mall got me further looking forward to the film. Born and raised in the 'burbs, I had especially empathized with Ghost World's equally alienated Enid when I was in high school. She seemed like just the kind of girl I longed to meet, and I could imagine myself seated on the bus next to her as she rode out of town in hopes for better futures.

Where Ghost World gave us Enid, Art School Confidential introduces us to Jerome (Max Minghella). A short prelude shows us Jerome's early years in the suburbs; he gets beat up at recess, develops his drawing skills and a love for Picasso, gets beat up some more, and endlessly pines after girls. After graduating high school , Jerome's artistic line of flight lands him at Strathmore Institute in New York City. While he continues to draw and pine after girls, the activities take on a new adolescent urgency. The Big Apple art world presents all sorts of dilemmas, among them the mysterious deaths at the hand of a roaming serial strangler.

Of course this all means our young Jerome has some coming of age to do. Quickly he befriends a Strathmore super-senior who claims to have the whole college pegged as little but a gallery of living clichés - the vegan guru, the kiss-ass, etc. (if you've seen the film's trailer, you get the idea). Attending a presentation by a Strathmore alumnus, Jerome learns the hardest truth about the art world: to be successful, one has to be oneself, as long as the self one is, is a total asshole. Another living example of this maxim is represented by yet another Strathmore grad, this one a disillusioned slob by the name of Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), who becomes something of an asshole mentor for Jerome.

Director Zwigoff seems to agree with the aforementioned super-senior concerning art school clichés; college studios and art galleries are the stand-in for the mall in this picture. In many ways, it's the art class scenes in Ghost World extended into a full length feature, augmented by a coming-of-age plot. It plays for the same laughs, directed at art's silly pretensions, but sometimes struggles to muster original plot points in the process. Jerome's obscure object of desire, Audrey (Sophia Myles), is rather haphazardly developed as a character, an oversight I might excuse as the film's tendency to hug to Jerome's perspective, if not for a few scenes of Audrey on her own. In these moments, the film borders on teen drama, and sometimes Strathmore seems just like the sort of college that's a high school after high school.

Art School Confidential also extends Zwigoff's animosity towards political correctness, something of a brown streak that feels like residue from Bad Santa. Any sort of politics mostly just plays for laughs, as do all alternative identities, ranging from a sexually-confused-but-flaming fashion designer to just about every lesbian the film comes across. Don't get me wrong, no archetype, marginalized or not, leaves this film unscathed, and of course it is funny. But I can't help wonder why the film takes up in its humor the same ass-hole maxim that animates Strathmore's students. Is the film saying being an asshole is the quickest route to success - be that an art sale or a laugh?

Had I seen Art School Confidential in high school, I might have empathized with its lonely protagonist, as I did with Enid in Ghost World. Jerome is, after all, a lonely boy looking for a smart girlfriend (Nor is the wonderful actor who plays him, Max Minghella, all that hard to look at. I'll certainly be keeping my eye out for him in the future). But unlike Ghost World, Art School Confidential leaves less room for ambiguity, and even lesser room for hope. The larger impression it gives is a cynical take on a world where the likes of Enid invetibly end up, suggesting that suburban refugees bring all the intellectual squalor of their homelands with them wherever they go.

That's not a notion I'm inclined to disagree with - I feel it in my own bones whenever I walk the streets of my own college town, and I felt it today wandering Alderwood Mall. But it provides little reminder that Strathmore's squalor isn't the only stop available on the restless soul's bus ride out of suburbia. When the film's final message about love finally arrives - in the shape of a wonderfully unconventional ending - it feels almost tacked on, because it fails to reconcile this message with its long feature-length laugh at the world that love struggles to exist in. It's a last ditch effort to laugh with us, but it fails to overcome the overwhelming feeling that, by and large, it's mostly just been laughing at us.

Back to Top