The second collaboration of director Terry Zwigoff with graphic novelist Daniel Clowes spends its first third humorously skewering the art-world, its second exploring romantic longing, and its last being derailed by a silly serial-killer subplot.
This comedy-drama represents the second collaboration of
director Terry Zwigoff with graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. The first, the
funny and heartbreaking Ghost World, is one of my favorite movies.
There’s a subplot about an art teacher that, in about 15 minutes of screen
time, makes most of the points about the art world that this one does in about
two hours. The main character (Max Minghella) here is not a quirky teenage
girl, but a semi-normal teenage boy hoping to score with a quirky art-school
girl as well as become a real artist. Not surprisingly, his drawings look a lot
like those of Clowes, or of Ghost World’s Enid. Like Enid, Jerome finds
his representational work shunned in favor of technically dodgy works deemed to
be more “expressive.
The art-teacher was probably the most broadly comedic one
in Ghost World, and the early parts of Art School Confidential
aren’t that far from many Hollywood comedies. A friend introduces Jerome to the
various “types” that populate the school (the credits include “bearded weirdo,”
“future critic,” “angry lesbian,” and “vegan holy man”), not to mention the
crazy, drunk “genius” (Jim Broadbent) who tells him art school’s a waste of
time. Meanwhile, he’s smitten with a girl (Sophia Myles) he’s seen naked (as a
model) but seems untouchable. Comedy gives way to pathos and, though the source
is familiar, the way that romantic disappointment translates to broad despair
is palpable. There is then a certain subplot that unexpectedly, and
unfortunately, comes to the fore, something about a serial killer running amok
on campus. This absurdist, absurd development overwhelms the story and brings
it to an ending that I found clumsy and unsatisfying, though not enough to ruin
the movie.
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