By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Zwigoff, Clowes, Malkovich Declassify 'Confidential'
“Wow,” Terry Zwigoff muttered from the stage at the Eccles Theater. “World premiere.” I am sure that in his heart, however, the rumpled filmmaker was overjoyed to be introducing his latest, Art School Confidential, which has had some mixed-reaction press screenings around New York but played just fine in its Sundance opening Monday night.
Reuniting Zwigoff with his Ghost World collaborator Daniel Clowes, Confidential veers into the story of a idealistic art school freshman whose ambition collides with competition, love, a serial killer and other harsh, um, realities of the art world. And while I’ve never been a big fan of Zwigoff’s previous narrative work, which always seemed kind of sterile and hammy, Confidential turns a bit of a corner with Clowes’s semi-autobiographical script and a nicely balanced lead performance by Max Minghella. The climactic turn-for-the-worse is still vintage Zwigoff, as are the squirming interludes of unqualified cruelty and clinking one-liners. Nevertheless, Confidential works in the context of this fucked-up, ego-ravaged community (modeled after Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute) where even the good guys can–and often do–lose their souls.
“Believe it or not those characters were not at all stereotypes,” Clowes said in the post-screening Q&A. “Those are actually people I went to art school with.” Their absurdity–like that of Minghella’s sensitive, unraveling young Jerome–and questionable talent underscores the limitations preventing them from art careers. As one character explains early in Confidential, to be a great artist, you must be a great artist, and even that is no guarantee of success. “To me, it was about that sort of a following,” Clowes added. “What you really want to do is what you love, but your own art mixes with commerce and other students influence each other and corrupt each other on both sides of the equation. So I thought (the story) would be more interesting conceptually in that regard.”
As Jerome’s frustrated professor, John Malkovich (above) makes one of his less eccentric, purely Malkovich-y turns in recent years. Audiences accustomed to seeing him in positions of quiet control instead have him lacking influence among his peers and gallery owners, as much a guiding hand to his worst students as he is a sycophant to his most talented. His character’s cynicism is far more complex than the garden-variety misanthropy that threads Zwigoff’s previous work (and even parts of Confidential); his failures here exist mostly as well-intended failures.
So, you know–if you like Zwigoff, you should probably like this just fine. If you do not like Zwigoff, expect a late-summer DVD release. But do try and see it, if only for the nude modeling at the beginning. You will thank me later. Or not so much. But still.
