Is there a difference between being a great artist or just having everyone thing you are? I had never thought about that, the central issue of the new comedy from the bitterly funny Terry Zwigoff. The film isn't quite as funny or as consistant as his two previous films (Ghost World and Bad Santa), but it makes some profound points about the nature of art.
Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) is a moderatley talented freshman art student who has won admission to Swarthmore University, a prestigious art school in New York City. Like all incoming freshman, Jerome is miserable- his parents think he's gay (because he's artistic), his roomates are weird, his classmates are talentless, his proffesor's don't really care, and he wants to have sex really, really badly. Even worse, he only wants to have sex with someone he loves- which further causes people to think he's gay. An amazingly thing happens when Audrey (Sophia Myles), the nude model in his drawing class, actual shows interest in his work and they begin a relationship. What seems to be a kind of miracle is threatend when the only normal art school student at Swarthmore, Jonah (Matt Keeslar), produces incompetant work that is misinterpreted as conceptual and amazing. Oh, and by the way, there's also a serial killer randomly picking off students at the university.
One of the most entertaining parts of the movie is that it knows what art classes are like, as well as the type of people who attend them- the stupid, mindless liberalism (as compared to the intelligent liberalism of film students), the drooling at conceptual work, the sensitivie people who cry if you say the slightest bad thing about their paintings. At the end of the film (no spoiler, keep reading) we see an art show, and it was somewhat stunning how similer it looked to a show that I had just been in.
In the introduction, I said that this movie is not as consistant as Zwigoff's previous works, and that's true- unlike most stucturally flawed movies, which either have a bad first or third act, this movie has a bad second act. The middle of the film (most of which is concerns the serial killer subplot) comes out of nowhere and looses a comparison with the art school stuff. Although I liked where the film ends up, I did not like how it got there.
The true strenght in the film lies in its ideas and how it presents. Jerome says he wants to be a great artists, but the film and the proffesors are unsure about whether this means producing brillaint work "That amazing moment of conception" as poor, bitter middle-aged artist (Jim Broadbent) calls it, or whether it is just having everyone call you a genius, make a lot of money, and be on the cover of magazines. Perhaps, I thought, walking out of the movie, there's no difference at all.
Art School Confidential (2006)