No doubt Art School Confidential, based on Daniel Clowes' graphic novel about a C-level Parsons clone cursed with a strangler and bad art, fancies itself this spring's great crossover hope. It only leaves me jazzed for a different cult-art film (Tom Hanks be damned): The Da Vinci Code. Although I haven't read his (some say hackneyed) bestseller, Dan Brown has admirably driven the masses to discover art, artists and art history.
Confidential and Code do share common ground; both concoct mythologies from unsolved murders, obsessive artistes and their misunderstood work. Yet, unlike the Code juggernaut, the snarky, PoMo Confidential lacks potency as visceral entertainment or intellectual fodder—too confused to be satire, melodrama, mystery or much of anything for mainstream or indie audiences. Worse, its broadsides about the state of creativity and creative communities in 2006 are as pessimistic as they are cliched. The disappointment stings especially because it's from the writer-director team of Clowes and Terry Zwigoff who created Ghost World—a sharp, heartfelt, unpretentious sketch of a deeply cynical Gen-Y hipster chick, Enid (Zora Birch), on the fringe of adulthood and contemporary culture.
Two-dimensional as any of the pierced, theory-spouting extras, protagonist Jerome (Max Minghella) initially defies definition. (Minghella is the son of English Patient and Talented Mr. Ripley director, Anthony, who knows a thing or two about truth, beauty, artifice and destruction.) A shrimpy, dewy-eyed, bushy-browed virgin, this outsider among outsiders never overcomes his own vagueness as an artist or individual—a fascinating, pathological character flaw ignored in Minghella's mouth-breathing performance.
In grade-school flashbacks, Jerome avenged schoolyard bullies with his violent, poop-stained drawings. He figures out the artist's schtick early. Impersonating Picasso in a Halloween presentation, he explains that short, bald Pablo's mad skills afforded him endless sex and free reign to experiment with abstract forms. Adolescent Jerome regresses, sticking rigidly to realistic portraits and dismissing the punk expressionist work of his classmates. He's unable to articulate himself about art or ideas at all, other than an ambition to be "the greatest artist of the 21st century" (Picasso Dos, in other words). Few agree with this assessment, and his technically impressive, rote class projects go unnoticed while a clean-cut idiot-savant basks in praise for his pure, Outsider Art-esque canvases.
Most dire of all, Jerome can't snag Audrey (Sophia Myles), a student/model Vermeer and DaVinci would rumble over. Audrey is as blank a canvas as her suitor. This head-patting Muse neuters his lust, leaving him in a quasi-religious state of stupefaction. Amidst the Strathmore "pussy buffet" (according to his pervy roomie), Jerome remains a virgin. Is it the physiological defect or spiritual purity of a brilliant artist? Thus detached, he barely keeps up with the ongoing campus killings (a Hitchcockian shoelace strangler) that dominate local headlines and inspire his roommate's horrendous film project.
When it becomes clear that he won't fairly win Audrey or an all-important, career-making competition among first-years, he desperately plots, chain-smokes and drinks Slizovitz in the fleabag apartment of a psychotically bitter, drunken artist (Jim Broadbent). The final, poetically tidy denouement recalled many paperback mysteries, not to mention that film thesis which Jerome's roommate produces and shows to his grandfather/financier.
"What the hell was that?" Grandpa asks. "I wanted a film with guns."
I don't know if I wanted guns, but I wanted something else, too.
