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paint-review.png

Review: ‘Paint’ is Exhausting

By Lindsay Traves | Film | April 9, 2023 |

By Lindsay Traves | Film | April 9, 2023 |


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Absurd biopics are really out here, with movies like Weird: The Al Yanckovic Story functioning as a parody, BlackBerry taking liberties to get extra comedy, and even Tetris adding videogame fun. It’s maybe easy to compare Paint to those movies with them all coming out in close succession, though it’s doing something very different. Paint isn’t quite a parody, but it’s not a biopic proper either. It’s a story about some people who work at a public television network that’s intentionally evocative of a real painter who once was the king of PBS.

Paint would have you think it centers around Carl (Owen Wilson), the soft-spoken aging painter with a public TV show, but it doesn’t. It’s also a story of Katherine (Michaela Watkins), a woman who found herself bewitched by the charms of the celebrity artist who is then spat out by him, leaving her to wander in self exploration. Sort of. Paint is about the journey of these co-leads, Carl trying to clutch onto his relevance while recognizing and realizing his real dreams of being a serious artist, and Katherine learning to put herself first and understanding the targets of her affections. Ambrosia (Ciara Renée) functions as a sort of catalyst, the young queer woman of color hired to have her own painting show in the same network, who symbolizes the incoming generation that pushes Carl to the sidelines and makes space for Katherine to adapt. So it’s not that there’s no meat to this otherwise flimsy sketch-stretched-into-a-movie, it’s just more that it seems strange to wrap an unflattering story about an aging and irrelevant white man who exploits young women who fawn over his celebrity around a parody of a beloved public figure.

Carl Nargle might be a creation for this story, but he’s a stand-in for Bob Ross, the beloved TV painter with a calm demeanor and large curly hair. Wilson is draped in a silly curly wig and left to softly mutter his lines whether they be about his envy or his disappointment. The story finds him being pushed out of his beloved job as a TV star and into teaching and ultimately retirement, something he struggles to accept without the help of Katherine or his new, younger girlfriend. The sweet vibes of Ross and this movie adaptation are lost in a weird tale about a guy accepting his age and leaving women in his wake.

And if we take the movie flatly, as a silly comedy in the vein of Weird (another parody biopic whose lead is dressed in voluptuous curls) that’s added story to justify its presence as a feature, it’s still quite a bore. Most of the comedy is centered around Carl’s large hair, which seems to be used to denote timeline (there are a lot of flashbacks) and his mood. But curly hair jokes are unfortunately not enough to keep this movie alive, and the long-running gag that has everyone speaking just above a whisper gets tiring quickly. The whole approach lands somewhere between a Wes Anderson film, Weird, and Napoleon Dynamite but only in tone and not in what makes those movies exciting or watchable.
Paint stays afloat by riding on ~*vibes*~, drenching its story in calmness, muted colours toned yellow, and the air of a “simpler time.” It looks like a Sunday afternoon and creates the sense of calmness you hope to find in a wooden cabin and a small town surrounded by greenery and lakes.

But its ultimate story and tone are either confused or confusing. It’s a confusing manifestation about capitalism, art as a commodity, aging, new generations, and gender imbalance that’s told like a swan song for an aging man. While it’s welcome to have stories split amongst people as a way of showcasing how their well-intentioned behaviors can sometimes hurt others, and to present stories of humanity that don’t necessarily insist on a prescribed moral, Paint just doesn’t land any of it and ends up a feature-length bit that’s like watching pai-… well you get the idea.

Paint was released April 7, 2023