Put-down Artist

It worked for Picasso: Aspiring artist Jerome (Max Minghella, at left) and filmmaking dude Vince (Ethan Supplee) in Art School Confidential. Photo Suzanne Hanover/United Artists/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media.

After a few meals in any high-school cafeteria, you can detect a common flavour running through the menu. The same goes for Terry Zwigoff’s comic-book inspired films. In his latest, Art School Confidential, a character expresses a sentiment that recurs in all Zwigoff’s movies — documentaries and dramas alike. “The entire human race,” he says, “should be wiped off the earth.”

Judging by his award-winning doc Crumb (1994), and features such as Ghost World (2001), Bad Santa (2003) and now Art School Confidential, Zwigoff seems to think we are a pestilential species without redeeming qualities, and the sooner we collectively shuffle off this mortal coil, the better. He sings this morbid song with gusto, almost with glee. Though he varies it slightly with each outing, by now the tune can be named after one note: it is misanthropy. And we’re not talking the sophisticated, Swiftian sort; but the whiny teenager I-hate-all-adults variety.

The high-school cafeteria metaphor comes easily when viewing Art School Confidential, because an early scene is set in one. Sensitive adolescent and would-be painter Jerome (Max Minghella, too handsome to make a likely dweeb) is drubbed at the lunch table by a jock. It gets Jerome thinking about his lot in life, and he imagines he can overcome his physical inadequacies by becoming a famous artist, like his idol Pablo Picasso. He plans to attend a prestigious art college, en route to securing his dreams of fame, fortune and, most importantly, women.

But when he gets there, everyone treads on this innocent’s dreams. Turns out art school is just like high school, with the same big guys striding around campus making life hard for comparative pipsqueaks. In class, Jerome’s hyper-pretentious classmates prefer the simplistic daubs of a jockish rube (Matt Keeslar) to Jerome’s precocious, almost Pre-Raphaelite portraits; accordingly, the bombshell of Jerome’s dreams (Sophia Myles), also prefers the rube to our hero. To make matters worse, Jerome has a drawing teacher who can’t draw (John Malkovich, never creepier as an embittered lech) and who attempts to seduce him. Finally, there’s a serial killer on the loose, strangling co-eds.

Hot for student: Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich, right) pays more attention to Jerome (Max Minghella, far left) than Jerome's art. Photo Suzanne Hanover/United Artists/Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media.

An illustrious painter who visits the college tells the students, “I am an asshole, because being an asshole is my true nature. I have gained the freedom to express my true inner self.” This sums up the movie’s corrosive cynicism about success in the arts. Underlining the film’s pervasive hostility to talent, it has an alcoholic never-was painter (a chilling cameo from Jim Broadbent), condemning Jerome’s hero as “Picasshole, a nasty little dwarf who went his whole life without a single original thought.” 

Art School Confidential is based on Daniel Clowes’s strip of the same name, and Clowes collaborated on the screenplay. As in so much comic-derived art, the film presents only three types of males: the alphas; those who want to become them (perhaps with Charles Atlas’s help); and irrelevant queens. (The film’s portraits of gay men — a fashion student and a chicken hawk — are as poisonous as anything to come from Hollywood in recent memory.) Women, on the other hand, are shown as suckers for powerful hunks, with no appreciation for a man with finer qualities — such as Jerome.

The problem is that Jerome, while an appealing babe in these very dark woods, really possesses no qualities that anyone would recognize as refined. He just wants to be an alpha male, too, to trick the female of the species into thinking he’s prime beef through his artistry. There is no creative urge in Zwigoff’s universe, only the urge to fornicate. As expected, the women are muses — objects of desire — not artistic forces in their own right.

The movie’s message is very pre-Enlightenment, but many an unoriginal storyline has been slicked up in the delivery. Here, though, the packaging is far from polished. Art students make a facile subject for satire, and Zwigoff always opts for the easiest jokes (“That table is practically reserved for post-minimalists”).  The identity of the serial killer is never really in doubt, thereby squandering the film’s potential as an arty whodunit.

By the end, the movie remains stuck in the cafeteria it began in, adopting a high-school mindset that divides everyone neatly into winners and losers. Life, art, everything is reduced to a skirt-chase. To say (in the English-class cliché), Zwigoff (with an assist from Clowes) explores the underside of the American Dream would be wrong. In this world, there are no dreams and no heaven awaits. Life is merely a nasty, brutish, extended adolescence. Ever wonder what the antisocial nose picker in the third row was thinking all through Grade 10 history? What bliss, at long last, to find out.

If the human race were, indeed, made up of the cretins that populate Zwigoff’s films, I’d agree: consign the species to extinction.

Art School Confidential opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on May 5; it opens across the country on May 12.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.