Art School Confidential (2006)

WHO SAID ANYTHING ABOUT TALENT?

In 1989, comic creator Daniel Clowes published Eightball, a series that featured numerous short stories and character pieces, as well as small diatribes and rants on various subjects. Amongst these stories was a four-page comic piece entitled Art School Confidential, which showed up in issue seven in 1991. Essentially a satirical exposé based on Clowes’ experiences in art school, the short piece became a fan favourite, most of who recognised the very character types Clowes wrote about. After the success of the film version of another Clowes property, Ghost World, the idea was struck to bring another one to the big screen. The popularity of the Art School Confidential piece made it the natural choice, with Clowes getting back together with Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff for the latest adaptation.

Jerome (Max Minghella) is a young guy from the suburbs who wants to be a famous artist, and heads to New York City’s Strathmore College for his freshman year as a drawing major. However, his fellow students are all nuts and the faculty care more about their own art projects. Even worse is the serial killer murdering people in the immediate area. Jerome also falls for Audrey (Sophia Myles), a model for his life-drawing class, but she seems more interested in Jonah (Matt Keeslar), whose primitive work draws raves from everyone, and the influence of the cynical failed artist Jimmy (Jim Broadbent) does little to lighten his mood.

As I said, what really sold the idea of adapting this piece into the next film version of a Daniel Clowes work was its great popularity amongst the comic book’s fans. When he wrote it originally, Clowes imagined only a handful of people would get it, and those would all be friends of his. It was perhaps a little short-sighted of him, since his Eightball series would have most likely earned him a fanbase amongst the art school crowd. Since this was the case, these art school students loved seeing someone expose the “million-dollar racket” of their college experience, shining a light on all the different kinds of oddballs, clichés and cretins that populated their hallways and classrooms. And the character types he looks at are great stuff, and they certainly make the transition from page to screen well, with several new additions.

Jerome is the film’s main character, and he’s the sincere guy who wants to be an artist because art is what he loves. He’s initially a little bland because he knows what kind of stuff he wants to do and merely wants the proper recognition and guidance to help him get there. When he finds himself surrounded by the various hipster/hippy/beatnik/angry/untalented/precious types, who all seem to get along much better than him, his confidence is shaken and he starts to become desperate to win the accolades and attention he thinks he should have. Indeed, it’s his exposure to his fellow students’ hostility and his teachers’ apathy that make him interesting. His one ray of hope in the whole place is that he seems to be making some headway with Audrey, the stunning young woman who poses nude for his class. However, it’s the increasing sense of despondency and bitterness he feels that makes it harder for him to get very far. Max Minghella plays Jerome well, a fresh-faced kid who does become more cynical as the film moves on.

The whole film is strewn with other great and interesting characters. Joel David Moore plays Bardo, the one who introduces Jerome around. Bardo is in his third year in the school as a freshman, because he constantly drops out and comes back with a different major. He knows the system and the people that come along every year, so he is able to spot the clichés a mile off, ticking them off with an amused derision as he points out each of them to Jerome in class. He’s also not above counting himself amongst the clichés, so he’s clearly very self-aware.

Jerome’s two roommates are Matthew and Vince. Matthew, played by Nick Swardson, is a pretty standard kind, the obviously gay, but completely closeted fashion student. Frankly, there’s little done with Matthew that’s funny, moving or even affects the plot, so he’s not much use. On the other hand, Ethan Suplee is on great form as Vince, the incredibly excitable and aggressive film student who has all the subtlety of a brick going through a plate-glass window… filmed in Cinerama… with surround sound… in 3D. He’s obsessed with making a film, but he seemingly has absolutely no concept on how film works, so it’s just garbled mess. I’ve been to film school (of sorts) and I have totally met this guy.

John Malkovich and Anjelica Huston each play teachers at polar ends of the scale. Huston is the unnamed Art History teacher, who seeks to engage with her students and discuss what art can mean as a representation of the artist and society. However, she is only met with contemptuous snorts from the class, who seem to think that because she used Hamlet, War and Peace and Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, it means she’s saying that good art must come from dead, white males. Her mild frustration is clear, but she remains unrattled by her students’ sneering defensiveness. Malkovich is the flip side to this. His Professor Sandiford is a pretentious ass, still trying to make it as an artist himself, so mostly shows indifference to his students’ work because, as Clowes puts it in the comic, “the last thing they want is more competition.” He’s also got a mild hint of the sexual predator about him, which his students seem to mistake as teacherly guidance, and think the world of him.

The two best characters, and the ones that come closest to the tone of the source material are Jimmy, the alcoholic failed artist and Strathmore graduate, and Marvin Bushmiller, the unabashedly hostile success story of the college art program. Jimmy is played by Jim Broadbent, and his frankness and unbridled cynicism make him a great antidote to the pomposity of the college, even if he is quite unsettling. Marvin Bushmiller is even better, played with caustic egotism by Adam Scott. Bushmiller is the one artist who made it, and returns for an evening of questions in which he seeks to mock the institution and try to get everyone to realise just how rich he is. When someone asks him what art will be like in the future, he dismisses it as a stupid and completely irrelevant question. When someone asks why he’s such an asshole, he responds, “Now, that’s a great question. No, it really is!”

Considering all of these characters, and the spirit of the source material, you’d think that the film would virtually write itself into something full of wit and irony… sadly this is not the case.

When you don’t consider the popularity of the original Art School Confidential as a factor, what makes the fact that it was chosen as the next adaptation so odd is that it is literally four pages of storyless rants. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve been known to indulge in such things myself. And what’s there is really very funny and honest, if incredibly bitter, although nothing that was as developed as Ghost World, which spanned eight issues and did have something of a story to it. As such, the decision to develop this much smaller piece into a film would require coming up with a story with which you could actually string these somewhat disparate segments together. Given the format of the original comic piece, and the retention of the title, you would expect perhaps some sort of journalistic thread that would run through it all. Perhaps the main character could offer a narration in the form of diary entries or letters home. Has it been done before? Yes, plenty of times. However, not only would it fit the tone of the piece, it would be infinitely preferable to the utterly generic murder subplot that becomes the main drive of the film. Although it does provide some good stuff for Vince’s attempted filmmaking project, it starts to take over the whole film, infecting the various relationships in the film and crippling their development. Perhaps Clowes and Zwigoff were trying to say something about the lack of inspiration in art, or a statement about bad film adaptations, which Clowes actually wrote about in Eightball, as Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. But, if this is what they were shooting for, they missed considerably. It seems more likely that Clowes simply had no idea as to what to do with it, and so hastily constructed some slapdash crime plot for his characters to wander through. It’s as if Clowes and Zwigoff took inspiration from Natural Born Killers or Ace in the Hole, making some attempt at media satire, but without the clever savagery of either. Hell, even Airheads hit the mark better than that. It would have worked out much better for Art School Confidential if they had taken inspiration from something like Rushmore. Now, obviously we don’t really need another Rushmore, but I’d be much more satisfied with that as a conceptual muse rather than something you’d get on a bad episode of Criminal Minds… and I really like that show.

Art School Confidential could have been a witty, insightful and perhaps a rather touching film. The performances are decent and the characters will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s ever studied any kind of art. However, the whole is fatally compromised by the serial killer subplot, which just steals time, focus and destroys any kind interest you’ve built up for these characters. If it had been kept as a straight character piece, it could have worked, but the common crime aspect is just too much to take.

All the Real Girls (2003)

LOVE IS A PUZZLE. THESE ARE THE PIECES.

Films about First Love (note the captialisation) are often rather tricky things to pull off. If they’re not taken as flat out chick flicks and therefore almost completely disregarded by half the potential audience, then they tend to get received with a degree of cynical snorting and derision. Perhaps they have grown to forget what they were like when they first felt it, perhaps they are still too close to it to remember it fondly enough see it onscreen, perhaps they just haven’t felt it and so can’t relate to what they’re watching. For his second feature, director David Gordon Green wrote a script, with help from friend Paul Schneider, about that very thing. First Love as felt by two quite different people.

In a small town in the American South, Paul (Paul Schneider) is known for having sex with pretty much every girl in town. When his best friend’s younger sister, the virginal Noel (Zooey Deschanel), arrives back in town after years in boarding school, Paul has to prove to everyone, especially his friend Tip (Shea Whigham), that this is more than lust guiding him.

David Gordon Green and Paul Schneider have been working together for a while now, with Schneider being in Green’s early shorts and his feature debut George Washington. At some point during this time, they came up with the story that would become All the Real Girls, with the final script being written by Green. The actual plot of the film is one that most people will be familiar with: promiscuous guy meets virginal girl, falls in love, tries to change his ways for her. Pretty straightforward. However, whilst that may be what happens, that’s not really what the film is about. The promiscuous guy in question, Paul, is someone to whom physical congress means little because he’s had so much of it; emotional intimacy is something completely foreign to him because he’s never experienced it. The virginal girl, Noel, is without any kind of experience with that kind of love, either physical or emotional. Thus, the film is about the awkwardness, the bashful sense of joy, the fear of being that open to someone else, everything that makes the first time you feel those feelings as intoxicating as they are. It’s about the kind of idealism that comes over a person when they feel love for someone so much that they want to improve on themselves, better themselves for that someone because they deserve it. Yes, it’s somewhat naïve, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re in it. The fact that he’s 22 and she’s 18 are almost irrelevant. They are still each other’s First.

The trajectory may be familiar, even some of the individual story beats may strike a chord of recognition, but what All the Real Girls has to set itself apart from the rest is its heart-on-its-sleeve earnestness. Without embarrassment, it recalls the strange sense of freedom that comes from being with someone that you can share everything with, say anything to. The kind of relationship where you can say to the other, “Sometimes I’m scared of myself, but I’m not scared with you,” just as easily as you can say, “Did you just fart?” It’s an honesty that is at once liberating, but equally scary because you know that the more open you are with that person, the greater the pain if they hurt you. And it sure does hurt when they do. Paul Schneider and Zooey Deschanel capture this couple wonderfully. They both give very natural, unaffected performances which means that, for all you may wish to brush off their cutesy back-and-forths, you don’t want to ruin this for them anymore than they do. You want them to be happy together. In their more emotional moments, both Schneider and Deschanel also get their frustrated inability to properly articulate themselves. Paul isn’t exactly the smartest guy in the world and Noel, despite her education and thoughtfulness, is even newer to these feelings than Paul, so they both struggle to tell the other what’s going on inside them.

This openness doesn’t just rest with our main couple, though. It extends beyond them to every other character. Tip, Paul’s best friend and Noel’s big brother, is given a moody intensity by Shea Whigham. He’s a guy who loves Paul like a brother, but he also knows him too well to be okay with his sister seeing him. For being kind of a lunkhead, he’s also not without some self-awareness. He knows he’s a screw-up and wants to be better, if not for his immature mindset. Paul’s mother Elvira, played superbly by Patricia Clarkson (when is she not superb?), is a woman of a rather deceptive dignity. Her day job has her play a full-on party clown to sick kids and her hobby sees her trying to mend very broken pianos, but she’s no quirky comedy role. Elvira is thankful for what her job has provided for her, but she would hate to see Paul have to settle like she did. She wants him to want more from his life, and it kills her to see him not trying. Benjamin Mouton’s Leland, Paul’s uncle and Elvira’s brother, is also quite touching as he recalls to Paul the pain of having had love, real love, and losing it not because of a fight, but because she died. He provides Paul with a sense of perspective in his relationship musings.

The filming itself is gorgeous, with the amber-coloured, almost rusty township carrying a sense of the desolate, but with some sense of affection. David Gordon Green grew up in a place like this, so it’s with some honest fondness that he recalls its memory. Here, people make do with what they’ve got. Hell, so do the animals. In one shot, there is what might just be the saddest, yet most heartening image you’ll see – a dog with no back legs walking comfortably on its front legs without problem. This town may be the place where things come to an end, but all they need is some attention and they’re still capable of producing something beautiful.

There are the occasional lapses in the film’s artifice, though. A scene with Paul and Noel standing together in a bowling alley halfway up a lane, leaning into each other, talking about things seems to push the boat out a little far. The scene is a little too designed, the body language too unnatural, that it all sticks out a bit. Another moment comes when Leland’s daughter Feng Shui sits with Noel’s younger brother Justin and, after they’ve both closed their eyes, talks about running on the ocean and over mountains and everybody loving you. It’s beautifully poetic, but it also threatens to derail the good will the audience has built up for the film. Fortunately, there’s never anything that gets in the way that badly, so the whole remains engaging enough throughout.

It’s easy to write off All the Real Girls as overly sentimental or self-consciously precious, and it certainly does brush up against that line a time or two, but to do so is to put a barrier up to the film before it gets started. It’s a sweet film, and is unashamedly earnest in talking about the happiness, sadness, joy and fear that everyone feels when they first feel real love, but are maybe just too emotionally immature to deal with it properly.