Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, USA)
Like Zwigoff's
Ghost World (2000),
Art School Confidential is also adapted from a Daniel Clowes comic, though this time only gaining basic inspiration as it was just a four-page self-contained story in one issue of
Eightball. The movie starts out hysterically, as we watch a young outsider in middle school tormented by bullies and too shy to talk to girls. He realizes that his talent for drawing could be his ticket to at once rise above the jerks and become adored by beautiful women. Now a high scool graduate, Jerome (Max Minghella) is off to art school where he hopes to find his way in the world. When he gets there he finds a kaleidoscope of every stripe of outsider, tenuously bonded together by art. Jerome has an obsession with a nude model, Audrey (Sophia Myles from
Underworld and
Tristan + Isolde), who was featured in the school's brochure, and when she models for his class he is thunderstruck. Even among other misfits, Jerome doesn't seem to quite fit in with his roommates and fellow students, and what's worse the odd faculty, especially his professor Sandy (John Malkovich), seem to praise an asthetic, or lack of asthetic, that Jerome just doesn't get. The portraits of art school freaks and burned-out faculty is all dead on. Some of them may be easy targets, sure, but a bullseye is a bullseye, and the first half of the film is full of great stuff. But there's also a series of murders around the campus, and the subplot of the viscious strangler becomes intertwined more and more with Jerome's story. At first it seems like a silly parody of slasher movies in a way, but by the final act it has melded into some sort of attempt at a larger satire. For me the satire and strangler stuff didn't work anywhere near as well as the extremely funny look at art school, which had a flavor of authenticity and was truly funny. Clowes' own work in
Eightball especially does this sort of thing blending disperate styles and storylines, but they are much more subtle connections and such dissimilar ideas, while they may very well be in the same issue, would not likely be intertwined as narratives. Not in such an obvious way.
But even with a narrative that I thought went astray a bit,
Art School Confidential is still a satisfying movie. The parts that do work are so funny, I can almost forgive that they write themselves into a corner. Max Minghella is good in the lead, but it's the diverse supporting cast that really steals the show. Malkovich is perfect, and the best acting done by anyone is Jim Broadbent, who plays an aged former graduate of the university who is a jaded, alcoholic shut-in living just off campus in a dark rent-controlled apartment and serves as a sort of mentor for the increasingly disillusioned and frustrated Jerome. He only has a handful of scenes, but Broadbent is having an absolute blast and does more with his eyes alone than most actors do with their entire bodies. Matt Keeslar is well cast as Jerome's rival in the classroom and for the affections of his dreamgirl, and Sophia Myles sufficiently dreamy as the love interest. Angelica Huston and Steve Buscemi aren't asked to do as much and their roles are familiar as the kinds of parts they've played before, but they are welcome glorified cameos just the same. Joel Moore (
Dodgeball) and Ethan Suplee (
"My Name Is Earl") are two of the stand-outs among the other students, and Adam Scott has a wonderful scene as a returning graduate who has made it big as an artist. But all of the parts, even the smallest background freaks and types, are all very well cast and effective.
I wish Zwigoff and Clowes would have had the inspiration and determination to carry the wit and energy and spot-on perspective of the first half of the movie all the way through to the finale, but it's still a pretty good flick that may well become a cult favorite among all of those who are dealing with the inequities of a system that grades something as purely subjective as art. To those artsy-fartsy kids in high schools and that you see walking around college campuses,
Art School Confidential could turn out to be their
Napoleon Dynamite or
Monty Python & the Holy Grail, where almost every line is memorized and quoted as a mantra.
GRADE: B-
The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron, USA)
Bettie Page was the pin-up queen and underground sex goddess of the repressed 1950s, and she continues to be an enduring icon today. With her trademark bangs, warm smile, jet-black hair and beautiful curves, she's automatically identifiable even if you've never known her name. This biopic looks at her rise and fall, how a modest good girl from Nashville, TN became a timeless sex object. Gretchen Mol, who back in '98 and '99 was tapped as one of the "next big things" but never had a role or success to justify her dozens of appearances on magazine covers and
"Enertainment Tonight", is really the perfect choice to bring Betty back to life. After years of rumors that anyone from Jennifer Connelly to Liv Tyler was going to star in the project, the lower-profile Mol (
Rounders, The Shape of Things) excels in the role. Great supporting cast too, led by Lili Taylor, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris and Sarah Paulson and featuring a dozen character actors in small roles and cameos including David Strathairn, Austin Pendleton, John Cullum, Matt McGrath, Michael Gaston, Max Casella, Victor Slezak and Cara Seymour. But it is most definitely Grethen Mol's movie.
The director and co-writer is Mary Harron (
I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) and she made some interesting choices that really work. The movie is shot mostly in black & white with some color sequences sparsed throughout. In both cases, it is shot very much in keeping with the style and look of lower budgeted flicks from the '50s, and this goes so far as to include obvious stock footage, with camera movements, lighting and frame compositions that harken back to the old B-movies. This could have been distracting and gimmicky, but I thought it worked very organically and did indeed give the feel as if this movie was somehow made in 1956. Even when dealing with dark subjects like incest and rape, it's presented exactly the same way it would have been then, but without ever becoming a self-conscious
Airplane!-style parody like
Die, Mommie, Die! or
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra from recent years that have fun with their one-joke premises but become tiring for an entire feature. That old-time '50s asthetic doesn't hold true when it comes to nudity, and there are quite a few scenes of the lovely Miss Mol as the lovely Ms. Page without any clothes on. But the nudity is presented in the same innocent yet seductive style as the eternally famous photographs of Bettie Page, who went from modeling in her bathing suit to modeling partially and completely nude to posing in bondage and fetish pics and one-reel mail-order films.
The Notorious Bettie Page is similar to Tim Burton's
Ed Wood in many respects, including in tone and presenting the title subject as an eternal innocent. This may be a more simplified take on who Page was and how aware she was of her impact and what she was asked to do, but for the narrative, the style of the film, the character and the performance, it works.
For any Page enthusiasts, all of the major points of her career are detailed, from her days with the "camera clubs" around New York, her chance meeting with Jerry Tibbs on the beach that led to her hairstyle, her popularity in magazines, the years of working with Irving and Paula Klaw, her Florida sessions with Bunny Yeager and her appearance as a
Playboy centerfold. I don't think some of the larger points the movie goes for about the hypocrisy of the repressed sexual culture are anywhere near as weighty and important as the filmmakers may have hoped, but it's a nicely understated biopic with interesting stylistic choices, a very good turn by Mol, and a breezy hundred minutes.
GRADE: B