Art School Confidential

Rating: ***

Taking the mickey out art school types is easy, but building a satisfying black comedy around them is some what harder to do. So from the writer of Ghost World and the director of Bad Santa we get Art School Confidential, a movie that somehow manages to be utterly hilarious some of the time and as dark as a crawl space under the porch the rest of the time.

Our hero is Jerome Platz (Max Minghella), a young man who's been the subject of ridicule his whole life due to his artistic leanings. After graduating high school he enrolls in a prestigeous art school in New York where he shares a dorm room with a closeted fashion major and an aspiring filmmaker directing a movie about a serial strangler that's been stalking the campus.

Jerome starts classes where he befriends a kid named Bardo (Joel Moore) who always starts the school year off with a new major. Bardo in turn, introduces Jerome to Jimmy (Jim Braodbent), a failed artist living in squalor. Jimmy warns Jerome that being an artist is more about how good you are at brown-nosing then it is about how talented you are at art. Jerome refuses to listen though, he's determined to make it and is sure that his talent will pan out and bring him success.

Of course a girl enters this somehow, through a drawing class Jerome falls for an art model named Audrey (Sophia Myles). Jerome desperately wants Audrey's affections and his desire for her, along with an ongoing disenfranchisement with his fellow art school students, leads him on a spiral of depression. The end result is utterly surprising, and not even remotely where I thought the script was going so I won't spoil it.

Easily the best part of this movie is the cast; anytime you can get John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, Steve Buscemi and Jim Broadbent on to the same movie set, you really know you've got something good here. Malkovich in particular is excellent, without a trace of creepiness, as Professor Sandiford, a man seemingly resigned to his life as a simple art teacher. His eppervesent personality is only betrayed when he's told that his art show isn't going forward; a split second later though he's back to instructing Jerome about finding his muse. Huston and Buscemi mostly show up in cameos as an art teacher a gallery owner respectively.

The main cast though is mostly unknown, led quite ably by Minghella, who's so far only had a handful of rolls in films like Bee Season and Syriana. He perfectly plays Jerome as one of filmdom's archetypal sad sacks; a little tortured, a little over his head, and very slowly going mad. Another actor I liked is Moore, although he's forced to give the stereotypical speech highlighting the various cliques at the school,but Moore's charm really sells it. It helps that Bardo is an interesting character, whose type I've never really seen in a movie like this: the kid who's turned changing majors into a kind of zen meditation.

Another brief performance I enjoyed was from character actor Adam Scott as one of the art school's most noted alumni. With a wicked dry wit he shoots down the kid who asks him how you get to be a great artist, while joyfully answering Bardo when he speaks up to ask him why he's such an asshole.

One of the things I liked about the script is the way it rips into the culture of the tragically hip art student; the type that dare to presume that they alone know what qualifies as new and innovative, worthy of praise and imitation. The film mercilessly and brilliantly undermines those guys, while putting forth the idea that art is in the eye of the beholder.

But the thing of it is that the script is terribly uneven. A great deal of the first hour is wall to wall hilarity, but the movie then takes a dark turn, and gets darker and darker, and just when you think it can't get darker - it gets really dark. The film then wraps up with an utterly hysterical and ironic ending that pretty much sums up the volatile nature of the art world; it completely blindsides you but makes perfect sense in the context of the movie. The trouble is that at times it fells like two different movies, or at least as if it was made by two different filmmakers making two versions of the same movie and then having them edited together.

There's also different things that fall flat, like a prolonged sequence at the beginning of the movie where one of the roommates gets obsessed with getting Jerome laid, followed by a montage of Jerome dating the stereotypical psycho movie girls. Sometimes the film feels a little too episodic, which is probably a holdover from the film's graphic novel origins. Also there are a lot of characters and subplots beneath the A story; probably a little more than necessary, and definitely more than can be adequately explored in a two hour movie.

Still for the reasons I outlined above, Art School Confidential is worth seeing. Always assuming of course that you can find it at a theatre near you.