PAINT - Mark Reviews Movies

Paint, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 6, 2023

With his curly perm and quiet demeanor and propensity for painting landscapes, there's little avoiding the real person upon whom Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson), the main character of Paint, is based. The man is basically a dead ringer for Bob Ross, the public television personality whose fame rose after his death with endless reruns and video streaming options and lots of internet jokes. Once one realizes that connection, the joke of writer/director Brit McAdams' movie has essentially run its course.

None of this makes much sense as a comedy, and McAdams' screenplay only makes a little bit more sense as a story. The central conceit basically crosses into parody, as Carl seems trapped in a lifestyle of the 1970s even though he lives in the present day. Even being generous with the timeline and ages, none of that adds up, especially since Wilson and the rest of the cast play their 20-year younger selves with only a hint of creating some illusion that their characters are two decades younger.

Forget all of that, though, because the mess of the movie's chronology in relationship to its protagonist's entire existence just makes us realize a more significant flaw here. There is no real joke or story to this movie, beyond the silliness of seeing this man now and the ability to recognize that he's supposed to be a stand-in for Ross. That single gag gets in the way of whatever else McAdams might be trying to do here, which is to tell a slightly serious story about being trapped in one's past successes and never moving beyond them out of fear of falling into failure.

If the character weren't an obvious and continuous joke, there might have been something to him and that central idea. Because he is a gag and only a gag and not a very funny one, it's nearly impossible to take him or anything else about this story seriously.

For 20-some years, Carl has been the star of the public television station based in Burlington, Vermont. Painting pleasant portraits of local landscapes, Carl holds the attention of retirees, those who stay home, and inhabitants of local bars in the middle of the day every weekday for an hour.

The station, though, is having financial troubles, and when head boss Tony (Stephen Root, who gets one forgettable laugh of the two decent jokes to be found within the whole scenario) suggests his star personality do a back-to-back block of programming, Carl turns down the offer. After all, it might look as if he's diminishing the value of his paintings, which are starting to be mostly of a nearby mountain.

The spare conflict begins with the hiring of Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), a younger artist whose stranger work makes her an instant and bigger hit than Carl. Suddenly, the audience moves to her show, and all of the women working at the station start to find Carl less appealing.

Oh, the other sort-of joke here is that Carl's anachronistic fashion sense, soft-spoken manner, and talent for painting the same picture over and over again make him a person of great sexual desire to the women on staff. Whether or not the monotonous humor here is meant to reflect the repetitious nature of Carl's life and work, an empty joke isn't any funnier the seventh time it's told.

All of this is trying to delve a bit deeper into this character, who desperately wants the esteem of the legitimate art world to match his fame. He's hopelessly in love with ex-flame/co-worker Katherine (Michaela Watkins), who cheated on Carl after his ego made her feel secondary in his life and who resents the fact she caught him in the back of his retro-styled van with another woman shortly thereafter. The guy is overly competitive in a petty way, and the joke to that, apparently, is that it has a foundation of impotence. It never works out for him, for one thing, but also, Carl never actually has sex with the any of the women who fawn over him.

Does this make him fundamentally good or just pathetic? The movie never decides, because, again, it doesn't want to any deeper than the idea that a man who looks and behaves in Carl's manner should be funny, right?

Maybe it is for a short amount of time, too, but once the oddity of the Carl's aesthetic and the recognition of his real-life source is established, Paint seems at a complete loss as to what to do with the guy. No matter how deep the movie may try to dig into his character, the superficiality of his existence becomes an impenetrable surface.

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