Insider humor for survivors of ARTforum.
Sometimes it's not what you do, it's who you're doing it with. Case in point: Taking in
Art School Confidential
, the new joint venture from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff, with a small but valiant crowd of theatergoers. Determined to
***image1***
enjoy themselves, the audience was obviously composed of RISD and MICA graduates, and their collective whoops of laughter turned an otherwise tepid film into one hysterical in-joke.
Jerome (Max Minghella, cute but not much to write home about) nurtures a long-standing desire to get into "Strathmore Institute" (resembling any number of East Coast art schools-but most likely skewering his own alma mater, Pratt). He also wants to become "a great artist," an ambition conflated in his mind with getting laid (surely short balding Spanish cubists can't be wrong). In his freshman class, all the stereotypes are represented, notes Jerome's sagacious new friend Bardo (Joel Moore): the vegan holy man, the angry lesbian, the boring blowhard, the kiss-ass, the mom "ready to explore her creative side." Among the clichés moves Audrey (Sophia Myles), the curvy blonde model-muse Jerome idolizes from afar; if only his paintings could make her notice him! But critiques go increasingly badly for the young figurative artist, bewildered by the success of classmates who scribble their self-portraits ("it's about the
process
of drawing"), refuse to do assignments at all ("my work has nothing to do with form or light or color," says the blowhard, filling an aquarium with ping-pong balls) and do naive renderings of sports cars à la high school guys doodling in their spiral notebooks. "It's like you forgot everything you ever learned," gushes one student to the clean-cut "weirdo" (Matt Keeslar), whose outsider
***image2***
automobile art attracts Audrey's attention, as well as impressing the professor (John Malkovich doing Corky St. Clair) and landing him a solo show. Jerome despairs of ever making his mark when he meets an alcoholic alum (the gleamingly wicked Jim Broadbent) who might be able to help…and who also might be able to solve the case of the serial "Strathmore Strangler" terrorizing the campus town.
In deference to its noir-genre allusions,
Confidential
has a seamy, dark underside; when Broadbent, slurping
slivovitz
from a dirty paper cup, hears of Jerome's ambition, his first question is, "Are you exceptionally skilled at fellatio?" (while the chirpy TV theme music for
The Facts of Life
plays in the background). Overall, it's a relatively weak film, primarily a running series of sight gags-but for artists on all rungs of the totem pole, anyone who's been shredded during a critique or had to be ingratiating to gallery owners, the film's cynical take on the art world will be blackly refreshing.
