Review of (Untitled), now showing at the Fox Tower

(Untitled)
Director: Jonathan Parker
With: Adam Goldberg, Marley Shelton, Eion Bailey, Lucy Punch, Zak Orth, Vinnie Jones

Every few years someone takes on the burden of satirizing avant-garde art and the fawning scene that supports it.  I guess each generation has to rediscover certain issues and deal with them.  The problem is that it is a big, fat easy target, and has been hit so many times before that there is precious little new to say about it.
And that brings us to (Untitled).  Adrian (Goldberg) is an avant-garde composer who does not suffer fools gladly, and he considers most of the human race as fools.  His music, wittily composed and performed specially for this movie by David Lang, attracts few listeners, and drives away most of those.  His brother Josh (Bailey) paints the same banal painting over and over with minor variations, and is a huge success.  He is represented by snooty and pretentious gallery owner Madeleine (Shelton), who sells his paintings by the square yard to hang in office lobbies and shopping malls.  The money supports her addiction to brain-dead pseudo-art.
When Madeleine hears Adrian’s music, she is swept off her feet, and starts an affair with him, even though she is seeing Josh.
Then, things begin to fall apart.  There are several characters in this film, including an aging enfante terrible artist (Jones), a dimwitted but rich buyer (Orth) and a musician in Adrian’s band (Punch) who may have a crush on him.
Part of the problem is that none of the characters is written very well.  They are cliche types doing exactly what we expect them to do.
Having said that, some of them do well with underwritten parts.  Goldberg manages to make us feel sorry for Adrian, who can glare with an expression that is both blank and baleful.  Jones and Orth hit their marks, as does Shelton, and Punch draws our interest while hardly saying a word.
I did laugh several times during the movie, and the film is not a complete disaster.  After all, though, there is not much here.
B-