CANFIELD REVIEWS ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

Jerome is a young man desperate to become a great artist. Upon enrolling at the exclusive dump called Strathmore he discovers that skill is near the bottom of the list of the qualities needed to rise above the heard, make the big bucks and get the nude model. In short he finds that to be a great artist you’ve also got to make a killing. Surrounded by drop-outs, hangers-on, wannabes and has-beens, Jerome heroically sketches onward. The only question is which will be broken first his career, his heart or his soul.

In a sense, what Zwigoff has done is to suggest that we are all behind the curtain and that it’s our awareness of our own level of fraud that renders us either sublime or ridiculous. There’s Jerome, the art student who, unlike most of his fellows, really is an artist in both technical and spiritual terms. There’s the teacher, Professor Sandiford, who is also an artist but would rather be a success. Jim Broadbent has a nice turn as a former Strathmore student who has gone from riches to rags and now hides behind bottles and bitterness. Matt Keeslar plays a student who may well win a much coveted career boost not because of talent but because his style is embraced as flavor of the month. And Sophia Myles plays Audrey a nude model who’s motives couldn’t be more hidden. Does she love Jerome or can she love anyone?

Zwigoff seems to be saying we can hide from it all we want, the truth is most people spend a lot of time pretending for others and ultimately themselves. What gets lost besides our time and energy is the reason we ever had to live in the first place. Pretense in art then may be far more dangerous than it is in real life.

But it’s one thing to misunderstand art and another to lose sight of the importance of right and wrong. Art School Confidential muddles itself with an unnecessarily complicated subplot involving a series of campus murders. But none of those moments really work very well in the film. What does work are the human touches. John Malkovich offers the most fully realized character in the film. As full of himself as he obviously is Prof. Sandiford is still, painfully, human. And when Jerome asks How long have you been painting….triangles? (as if it were time to move on to something else) Sandiford barely notices assuming it’s a compliment. “I was one of the first. ”He intones.” It’s a laugh out loud moment for anyone willing to see themselves in either character.

But it’s not the money shot.

I think the money shot in this movie involves one of the nude models named Sandy. What follows is a small spoiler not revealed in trailers for the film. Egged on by his new friend, multiple dropout and enrollee Bardo, Jerome fully expects (as do we) a beautiful young female model to emerge from behind a dressing curtain. Instead the nude is a male.

The camera doesn’t flinch, although the audience I was with did (seasoned critics no less). Sandy is a beautifully sculpted young man with long flowing blonde hair and an impressive set of yoo-hoos in full view of the camera. Zwigoff knows even his audience isn’t quite used to the sight and that they might be wondering just where all this headed. Suddenly we are the students, our motives are in question.

It’s all sublime until Sandy speaks. Not a sentence has left his mouth until (we think) we see him for what he is; a used up stoner fast approaching middle-age using his cool gig as a nude model to try and pickup chicks far too young for him. As if to drive the point home Sandy wanders around the room during a break pausing in front of a female students drawing table. Of course the table is at crotch level. As he stretches bringing his crotch ever closer, the girl, gets a “not again” look on her face collects her things and leaves. Unfazed, Sandy, now a complete buffoon in our eyes (we’ve been vindicated), notices Jerome’s drawing. It’s a marvelously craggy sketch that focuses on the tired face of it’s model. It finds beauty there and a sense of humanity that we missed- but then again we weren’t really looking for that were we?

It’s a moment that’s not for everyone but for me it was a money shot. It showcased the heart and the soul of what art is for, revealing truth and beauty about the subject and even the audience. We aren’t left alone but changed by it just as Sandy isn’t just defined by the moment we encounter him in or his actions in that moment. Sandy is (and we are) a work in progress, unfinished, but still ineffable, and certainly beyond dismissal. He is as worthy to be a model as we are to be spectators and he has been endowed with more than just impressive yoo-hoos, there’s an undeniable beauty beneath his childishness.

There’s a great sequence in C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce where an artist explains his refusal to venture into heaven’s foothills. He’d rather paint the object than possess it. Inspiration and medium have switched places robbing the man of his ultimate reward. Zwigoff robs us here by not having enough confidence in his characters to let them be the focus of the story. They tell us everything we need to know to march towards a greater reward; truth sometimes ugly sometimes beautiful and full of life, the possibility of change and the power to inspire.