The problem for me with Art School Confidential was the ending. I say that about a lot of movies, but I never thought it would be with one this cynical. (Well, I didn’t like the ending to Serenity either, but that movie hadn’t taken the time to earn its cynicism.) Art School Confidential was directed by Terry Zwigoff, of Ghost World and Bad Santa fame, and I like that he’s cynical. Movies don’t have enough true cynicism these days. They pretend to, but even the occasional “hip” ones that feign cynicism 90 percent of the way finish by handing audiences their lollipop. Not Zwigoff, and not Art School Confidential. That’s the good news.

The bad news is I don’t buy the main character’s acceptance of that cynicism. Jerome (played by relative newcomer Max Minghella) is your typical art student: shy, introverted, as a kid he was bullied (and Zwigoff makes that bullying painful). But he’s good at drawing, and as for those bullies, he’ll show them: he’s gonna be the greatest artist in the world! The movie knows he’s your typical art student, but he does not; part of its fun is seeing him figuring that out. The first half of the movie is fantastic in its little observations – one girl comes to school not wearing any shoes and steps on a broken bottle; a skateboarder comes in dragging a suitcase on wheels behind him; one teacher doesn’t care which students come to class and is clearly doing his work for the paycheque; another (played by John Malkovich) looks at the classes he teaches as something he’s doing in his spare time, while trying to hawk his masterpieces: portraits of triangles.

And that’s another great thing about this movie – how well it mocks the art world, and art in general. I could see people drawing triangles a certain way and saying it took them 25 years to learn to do that, and then later glancing the side-view of a car that looks a little better (but not much) than something I drew in kindergarten, and saying it looks amazing (after all, this country’s most expensive painting is two stripes). There’s a scene in the movie where a teacher (a cameo from the woefully underused Anjelica Huston) asks what makes Shakespeare and Beethoven art and is rewarded with students arguing over why everything that’s survived for more than 100 years came from dead white European men. The people in this movie are so focused on defining what “art” is, and dismissing it, and discussing its cultural context, that they forget how to make any themselves.

Which kinda makes what I’m about to write feel all the more useless, but here goes: Daniel Clowes (writing the screenplay on his own this time, after working with Zwigoff on the adaptation of his comic, Ghost World) is great at introducing characters, and Jerome; his friend Bardo (Joel Moore); Audrey (Sophia Myles), his love interest (a nude model, naturally); Matthew and Vince (Nick Swardson and Kevin Smith regular/My Name Is Earl’s Ethan Suplee), his fashion-design and film-student roommates respectively; the art teachers; the asshole student who went somewhere (Adam Scott); the student who didn’t (Jim Broadbent); Bob, the owner of a nearby coffee house that’s been the launching pad for every graduate with substance (an uncredited-for-some-reason Steve Buscemi); and Jonah (Matt Keeslar), Jerome’s rival, are all drawn wonderfully. There’s a great scene early on where Bardo, who’s dropped out of two programs already, tells Jerome how everyone fits a certain countercultural stereotype: the enrolled mom, the kiss-ass, the empty-headed art student, the girl with emo problems, and of course himself, the veteran. Characters are established with a few lines, ticks, or quick actions, and the movie moves on. The first hour is wonderful as Jerome (whom Bardo says he can’t categorize) interacts with the cast, learns how poorly his dreams square with reality, and the movie cheerfully deflates everyone’s artistic pretentiousness.

Then the second act comes in. Those memorable supporting characters are forgotten, in favour of a conventional (and far too pat) murder-mystery drama (Bardo’s last line to Jerome, “you’re the class douchebag,” is especially perplexing). There’s a murderer walking around, known as the “Strathmore Strangler,” and in one of his more wince-inducing scenes, Zwigoff gleefully focuses on one of his murders. Throughout the film Suplee’s character is making a movie about the Strangler, but it’s only in the last 40 minutes that his existence is also Jerome’s problem. And here I will avoid giving spoilers, suffice it to say the movie relies on one or two groan-inducing plot elements, and Jerome’s struggles, his coming to terms with where he stands in the art world, his pursuit of Audrey, come to a head in a way that’s far from expected, though I could see it happening in real life.

The problem is, I can’t see Jerome accepting it. I think he would protest. He doesn’t. He stands up to Jonah, but not… anyway. This conflict between character and plot is why I find the ending of Art School Confidential so maddening. Not maddening enough to spoil it for those who may want to see it, but still maddening.

After the movie was over, I needed to use the bathroom and overheard two other movie critics talking about it. One said he noticed the early reviews had been mixed but he thought he could see where the filmmakers were coming from, and liked it. In other words, he saw the movie’s “hidden meaning.”

I couldn’t help but think that Zwigoff and Cloves, after satirizing it with their clueless students and teachers trying to find meaning in grade school-level drawings, had taken everyone in the audience for the same ride.

3*






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