Wooing Women

In Dead Poet's Society, Robin Williams asks why people write poetry. After buzzing the (incorrect) answer in this male prep school circa 1960, he reveals the secret: to woo women. Women dig guys who can write poetry.

Art School Confidential makes the same conclusion about art. Max Minghella, son of director Anthony Minghella, plays Jerome, who as a kid, was bullied for enjoying the art, and eventually joins Strathmore, where he falls for Audrey (Sophie Myles), a sometimes nude model and daughter of a resident artist.

You can tell that this is a film made by someone who is intimately familiar with art school, which is basically like high school filled with the brainy types. Art school is filled with its own stereotypes, just like high school is filled with its own stereotypes.

It would normally be seen as weakness to put a tertiary plot on top of life in art school and a budding romance, especially adding a strangler that the school seems obliviously unconcerned about. One guy wants to make an (awful) film about this, and the rest simply don't care.

I must admit, each time Max Minghella showed up, I was thinking, is that Wil Wheaton? Well, of course, I knew it wasn't, but it's probably the kind of role he wish he could have gotten before STTNG caused his career to sink. Ultra-thin whiny types don't get cast that much, I suppose.

Clowe's relation with art is very much love-hate. (Clowe is the screenplay writer). He knows art is filled with pretension, that what makes great art seems as much due to what people think is art. Everyone gushes over Jonah's rather childlike art. Jonah's the foil for Jerome. He's the good looking type that seems oddly out of place. Turns out (spoilers) he's an undercover cop. Art, for him, is a liberating experience. His wife has him p-whipped. His colleagues are made out to be Italian cop stereotypes.

While I liked the film moment to moment, that the plot seemed to reduce to boy chasing after girl, and realizing that fame would win kudos with her, so he takes the paintings of a crazy man (an almost unrecognizable Jim Broadbent doing his best American accent) who apparently is the strangler and uses it as his own to woo the girl. And, in some odd way, it works. He goes to jail and is as popular as ever, and the girl of his dream somehow knows he's gone to great lengths to woo her (even if she knows he didn't do the dastardly deed).

Is the device of a romance and a strangler enough to sustain the story of life in art school? Eh. I think it could have said something more intelligent about art, but then, maybe it's just that. Art isn't always just art. It's about impressing others.

Which isn't that much unlike romance.