Beyond the Multiplex

"Art School Confidential": The ribald college comedy that turns into "Taxi Driver"
Screenwriter Daniel Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff agree: Their new movie, "Art School Confidential," is pretty strange. "It's certainly an odd film," says Clowes. Half an hour later, in a different New York hotel room, Zwigoff describes his first reaction to Clowes' screenplay: "Gosh, it's a very odd script."

This isn't what you would call breaking news. Clowes made his name as one of the leading underground cartoonists of the '90s; his long-running "Eightball" comic and its various spinoffs, including "David Boring" and "The Manly World of Lloyd Llewellyn," are classic examples of the genre's combination of self-mocking angst and deadpan cultural satire.

Meanwhile, with the documentary "Crumb" and the narrative features "Ghost World" (also written by Clowes) and "Bad Santa," Zwigoff has established himself as one of American film's strangest success stories, a professed throwback, nostalgia buff and borderline misanthrope who has somehow become a hot director. He told me that he recently "took a meeting" with Johnny Depp, and, yes, he used that phrase.

So odd is expected, maybe even required. What isn't expected, after the duo's pitch-perfect indie hit with "Ghost World," is a film that lacks confidence and clarity, that isn't sure whether it wants to be an earnest coming-of-age story or a vicious takedown and ends up as a misshapen hybrid of those genres and others besides. "Art School Confidential" (tenuously based on one of Clowes' "Eightball" comics) begins as a hipster take on the college comedy, with Max Minghella as Jerome, an innocent would-be Picasso surrounded by the various hustlers, phonies and slimeballs of art school. Then it becomes a half-jokey serial-killer yarn, an unconsummated romance and finally a fable of success with an ironic, "Taxi Driver" sting in its tail.

I like and respect Clowes and Zwigoff, both as people and as artists, and it's clear that they deliberately set out to defy audience expectations and create something dark-hearted and subversive. I just don't think it works. I would love to tell you that "Art School Confidential" is a misunderstood masterpiece, the "Cable Guy" of this decade. Instead, I think it's an intriguing misfire, an intermittently lively work of self-defeat.

Mind you, there are still plenty of reasons to see it, especially if you fit the Clowes-Zwigoff aging hipster demographic. John Malkovich, who helped produce the film, has an enjoyable turn as one of Jerome's instructors, a washed-up predatory poseur who has spent 20 years perfecting his painting style (near-identical triangles, over and over again). Jim Broadbent is even better as Jimmy, an embittered ex-prodigy rapidly drinking himself to death in a squalid apartment near the art school campus. Jimmy's an uncanny example of the kind of aging boho whose antisocial attitudes have festered into something genuinely disturbing, and in many ways he's the real heart of the film.

Then there's the mysterious Jonah (Matt Keeslar), a jocklike dude who seems like a fish out of water in art school but becomes the class sensation with his naive, subversive-by-accident paintings of sports cars and tanks. Jerome, a sensitive and dedicated young craftsman with a gift for figure drawing, seems positively old-fashioned in comparison. Blond model Audrey (Sophia Myles), the subject of his best work, seems drawn toward both him and Jonah, which sets the film's erratic plot in motion.

"I think of the movie as very emotionally autobiographical," says Clowes. "It's very much about the dilemma that I go through as somebody who's trying to be a working artist and trying to navigate questions of, do I do my own thing that nobody likes? Or do I move towards this other thing that people do like? Or do I just forget about everything that I'm interested in and do only what people want from me? You try to remain pure at all times, of course, and nobody does. It's very difficult to know how to feel about yourself. That's what it's about."

The movie's original impetus, Clowes says, came less from his own comics than from the infamous 1958 exploitation picture "High School Confidential!" which this film's plot imitates in ways I won't reveal. "I really wanted to have the elements of an exploitation film, and yet have it lead to something else. It was a little more thought-out than a Roger Corman film, but it has gratuitous nudity and murder and college high jinks, all that stuff. Then I wanted it to shift; all of a sudden it takes things seriously, and follows that through to the end."

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