.MOVIE LISTINGS | MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE | THEATER INFO Killer Art Adventures on the road to fame BY MOLLY TEMPLETON ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL: Directed by Terry Zwigoff. Written by Daniel Clowes. Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Ethan Suplee, Matt Keeslar, Anjelica Huston and Jim Broadbent. Sony Pictures Classics, 2006. R. 102 minutes. Green Paint Guy (Jarret Reid) throws himself into his work. In 2001, director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb) and comic artist Daniel Clowes adapted Clowes' story Ghost World into a pitch-perfect movie about a girl too clever for her own existence. As drifting best friends Enid and Rebecca, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson were a delicate, precarious pair, all clunky boots, emotional detachment and ironic ensembles. Ghost World looked like the comic book it came from and successfully captured an elusive feeling that exists somewhere between the images and the text in books by Clowes, Adrian Tomine and Craig Thompson, to name a few. Unfortunately, the second Zwigoff/Clowes collaboration falls far short of the first. Art School Confidential, adapted by Clowes from a four-page story in his Eightball #7, has little in common with the perceptive, nuanced and moving Ghost World. Instead, it's a dark, dreary, heavy-handed take on the uselessness of art school, the cruelty of the art world and the inevitability of trading integrity for success. Art School follows Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) as he heads off to the prestigious Strathmore Institute, a New York art school where Jerome, like every one of his classmates, hopes to become the greatest artist of the 21st century. Jerome's favorite artist is Picasso, who got famous and got laid, so it's no surprise that Jerome is neither artistically original nor interesting to women. He falls in love with a pretty artist's model, Audrey (Sophia Myles), who stops paying attention to Jerome when a new guy, preppy Jonah (Matt Keeslar) draws praise for his colorful, poppy art. So the girl's not into Jerome, his classmates aren't interested in his art, and to top it off, there's a serial killer on campus. Adults in the movie are around to show the students just how bad it gets after graduation: Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich, whose sly performance is easily the film's best) clings to a shred of idealism but gets no respect. Strathmore alum Marvin Bushmiller (Adam Scott) is super-famous, but he's a pompous asshole. And drunken Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), frustrated and raging, has turned his disillusionment into wretched misanthropy. Where Art School Confidential briefly succeeds is in giving the increasingly desperate Jerome a questionable road to fame, fortune and Audrey's adulation. When Clowes turns his attention away from the self-obsessed art student caricatures that overpopulate the movie, he occasionally hits on a potentially interesting (if familiar) question or two: What is the price of fame? What makes art timeless? Can art be taught? Are you really as likely to be throttled by a serial killer as you are to become a great artist? The joke, then, is that for the most part these are the same questions asked by the students' art professors. But like so much else in the film, the joke falls flat, the meaning lost under layers of bitter but empty observation. The dialogue tries so hard to be pointed that it misses the mark, going for too-obvious jokes and leaving multiple montages with the film's best bits. Students arrive, eccentricities on parade; later, they work on their term projects, throwing themselves against large canvases or taking Polaroids of their genitals. With this kind of material, snide commentary is hardly necessary. Clowes and Zwigoff have a sharp eye for the truth within the stereotypes, but they seem uncertain what to do once they've made it clear they're not in favor of insincere artists and their insular, self-congratulatory world.
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