Art School Confidential

In Art School Confidential (2006) an ambitious, naive young man enrolls in an art institute planning to become the great artist of his century. His name is Jerome Platz. Picasso is his hero. He draws graphic and detailed portraits of his friends. Art school for him is a relentless series of disillusionments. Even though this film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be and isn’t really willing to decide, it is often humorous and entertaining. It is first of all a satire of college and art schools. Many of the teachers at the school are burned out and care about nothing. Others are too caught up in their own careers, or what pass for careers. One teacher tells his students that he doesn’t care whether they come to class. Another gives universal praise to whatever his students do, whether they are painting refrigerators, inchoate shapes, or human forms. Everyone gets an A. Another artist explains that the only way to succeed in the art world is to be good at fellatio. The students themselves are a motley assemblage of poseurs, pretenders, dunderheads, divorcees, and so on. The rare talented student such as Jerome is lost in the melee. The film implies that there are no standards in art school or the art world, that the students are exploited by their teachers who themselves are exploited by the school they work for, threatening them periodically with budget cuts and layoffs. (The teachers in the one school of art I am familiar with are not like the ones in this film).

Directed by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, 2001, and Bad Santa, 2003) Art School Confidential wanders among three or four separate but tenuously related plots. One focuses on Jerome’s experience and disillusionment in art school. Another involves his love for a model he meets in drawing class. Still another is a plot involving confused identities. And a fourth is a murder mystery--art school students are being strangled by a serial killer.

The film seems most interesting when it follows Jerome. Passionate about his work, he soon discovers that no one in art school cares about his art. He is attracted to a beautiful young woman, Audrey (Sophia Myles), who models for his drawing class. She has a full and beautiful, luminous face of the sort one sees in Vermeer and later in the pre-Raphaelites. She is impressed by his drawings of her but initially does not return his love. A scene late in the film shows her frantically digging through a dumpster full of discarded student art, looking for one of his paintings of her.

Jerome’s struggle to find an aesthetic style that will impress his teachers and fellow students, and his love for Audrey, brings about an identity crisis that dominates the second half of the film and loosely ties the various plot strands together. No need for spoilers here. The dark tone of despair that pervades Jerome and the film as a whole in its latter half I have seen in other films aimed mainly at the adolescent crowd—films like Brick and Donny Darko—films suggesting that life offers only entrapment, anonymity, doom.

The film offers an interesting assortment of characters. Max Minghella is effective as Jerome. John Malcovich plays Jerome’s drawing teacher, Professor Sandiford, an over developed egotist who enthusiastically explains to his students that only one in a hundred art students will ever make a living as an artist. He invites Jerome over to his house, shows him his paintings of triangles and other geometric shapes and explains that he was the first to begin painting triangles and that he has been doing so for twenty years. He offers to do anything he can to help Jerome and implies that they should have a sexual relationship. Anjelica Huston appears briefly as an art history teacher who talks to her indifferent students about the great works of art and literature. Joel Moore appears as a long-term student who changes his major once a semester. Jim Broadbent (the master of ceremonies in Moulin Rouge) is an alcoholic artist obsessed with the serial killings. Ethan Suplee (My Name is Earl) is great as a bumbling film student. Steve Buscemi appears in an uncredited role as a coffee shop/art gallery owner. I especially liked the undercover cop posing as an art student who begins to wonder whether his crude efforts at drawing might have some value.

The second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 provides especially effective background music for the film, especially as a musical theme for Jerome and his love for Audrey.

Ultimately, Art School Confidential is not successful. It feels incomplete, like a rough draft rather than a finished product. It moves from comic satire to tragic melodrama. It is alternately romantic and dark, and these oppositions are not organically justified by what happens to the characters. It resorts to a thin and glib nihilism. And ultimately the resolution simply isn’t convincing—especially the notion that an art dealer would want to keep an innocent man in prison so that his work will continue to sell--though this idea supports the film’s contention that the art world is based on fraud, entrapment, money, and cynicism.