Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Art School Confidential / USA / 2006

Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential is populated with clichés in the interest of displaying a confident self-awareness. But this is easy; clichés are facile components that can be in service to narrative, but aren’t here. They’re just pawns in a stalemate, a group of students meant to qualify this depiction of an art school because they demonstrate the varying personalities it attracts. Having been to art school, this is totally familiar to me, and there’s a hint that Zwigoff is employing a familiar argument in art: that persona often overshadows work.

In Art School Confidential, one freshman has two paramount concerns that become manifested in his work: to be the greatest artist of the 21st century, and to lose his virginity. His aspiration becomes overwhelming, so much so that he is inevitably dissatisfied with the reception of his work as well as his ability to coerce the opposite sex into his dorm room. He transforms, his dissatisfaction replacing what aspirations he has left—drinking liquor straight from the bottle and smoking cigarettes, he’s a nascent model of his role model: a former graduate of the same program he’s in, who’s jobless and filthy, and whose sole merit is an apartment with rent control. (In the hands of Jim Broadbent, this character is responsible for the film’s best scenes.) This transformation is best relayed in my description, as Max Minghella — the aforementioned freshmen — is totally inadequate in communicating any internalized hostility and apathy because he’s too kempt. Every time he smokes a cigarette it looks like it’s the first time he’s ever smoked one, and he just looks funny — instead of pitiful — by himself at a bar with a pair of shots in front of him. And it doesn’t look like he can grow a beard—a must in relaying internalized hostility.

Related: Ghost World

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Sony Pictures Classics DVD
24 Oct 2006 11:29 AM | Submit Comment