Art School Confidential Issue #27

directed by Terry Zwigoff

By Rebecca Flint-Marx
Published: March 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

Art school has long cried out for a film of its own, and it would seem there would be no better team to pay it its due than Terry Zwigoff and Dan Clowes. In their 2001 adaptation of Clowes' Ghost World, they lent pitch-perfect voice to disaffected high school girls and the alternately pretentious, deluded, and bewilderingly stupid people surrounding them. So capturing the world of art school — typically peopled by a similar demographic — should have been a cinch. If only.

Where Zwigoff's previous films (see also Crumb and Bad Santa) were marked by mordant wit that felt both effortless and true, Art School is burdened by stale, achingly self-conscious jokes more at home in some lame frat-buddy movie attempting to poke fun at a stock-art geek character. We're given the guided student stereotype tour — "the vegan," "the angry lesbian" — and are expected to laugh knowingly at such novel, trenchant observations. Enid Coleslaw's art class scenes in Ghost World already hit these marks, and did so with far greater accuracy and verve.

Art School’s biggest problem comes straight from central casting. Its protagonist, Jerome, is a shy, moist-eyed virgin who imagines that his talent will earn him the admiration and sexual favors of his classmates, as well as recognition as the most important artist of the 21st century. Unfortunately, the job of expressing Jerome's desires and frustrations has been given to Max Minghella, who emotes with the passionate conviction of a broken Morse code transmitter. Minghella possesses the rare ability of sucking the air out of whatever scene he's in, a dangerous gift in a movie that needs all of the oxygen it can get.

From its lame jokes to its tired conceit (Jerome's talent is recognized only after he's mistaken for a serial killer) to its jarring sense of place — we keep seeing headlines from the New York Post, but the school appears to be located in both L.A. and Toronto — nothing in Art School feels or looks quite right. Barring some priceless work by John Malkovich as a preening professor and a scene involving "Stacy's Mom," we're left with something that's, well, artless.