It's easy to see why this movie got terrible reviews (in every sense), and continues to get them here. A reviewer, by definition, is not an artist. This movie is a bracingly tough-minded depiction of how a person becomes an artist, and every pitfall along that path.
Art School Confidential starts out like a satire, with a lacerating, devastating series of portraits of all the ways non-artists look, sound, behave and think. The students are spoiled narcissists, suckups, politicking weasels, imitators, or mindless followers of fashion -- all of them looking for validation outside themselves. The professors are failures who express their self contempt by becoming bullies, phony gurus, and sexual predators. And just beyond the "school" (in which no one learns anything) lie the leeches: the various patrons and marketers to whom art is just another product to buy and sell.
Our hero, Jerome, must navigate his way past them all and learn to live and create without their approval or even their comprehension. Failing this test, the other artist character Jimmy (beautifully played by Jim Broadbent) has become bitter, cynical, and ultimately homicidal. This is why the film seems to become darker as its true seriousness of purpose unfolds. This isn't a satirical teen comedy what saves Jerome is his relationship with Audrey, but his final test as an artist is to see beyond his physical attraction to her and to finally understand her as his muse.
I've read dozens of reviews of this film and I don't think I've seen the word "muse" once. Anyone who doesn't get that point, illustrated beautifully in the film's final amazing image, doesn't know what they're watching. Most movies, no matter how cynical or dark, just want to be loved. Art School Confidential wants to show the world as it is and tell the truth about it. And it seems it has demonstrated its own thesis by ending up as unloved and misunderstood as its protagonist.
Art School Confidential starts out like a satire, with a lacerating, devastating series of portraits of all the ways non-artists look, sound, behave and think. The students are spoiled narcissists, suckups, politicking weasels, imitators, or mindless followers of fashion -- all of them looking for validation outside themselves. The professors are failures who express their self contempt by becoming bullies, phony gurus, and sexual predators. And just beyond the "school" (in which no one learns anything) lie the leeches: the various patrons and marketers to whom art is just another product to buy and sell.
Our hero, Jerome, must navigate his way past them all and learn to live and create without their approval or even their comprehension. Failing this test, the other artist character Jimmy (beautifully played by Jim Broadbent) has become bitter, cynical, and ultimately homicidal. This is why the film seems to become darker as its true seriousness of purpose unfolds. This isn't a satirical teen comedy what saves Jerome is his relationship with Audrey, but his final test as an artist is to see beyond his physical attraction to her and to finally understand her as his muse.
I've read dozens of reviews of this film and I don't think I've seen the word "muse" once. Anyone who doesn't get that point, illustrated beautifully in the film's final amazing image, doesn't know what they're watching. Most movies, no matter how cynical or dark, just want to be loved. Art School Confidential wants to show the world as it is and tell the truth about it. And it seems it has demonstrated its own thesis by ending up as unloved and misunderstood as its protagonist.