Mildly amusing and intentionally quirky, Paint is never laugh-out loud funny.
Owen Wilson plays Carl Nargle, a soft-spoken, Bob Ross-type painter, who hosts a painting show on a Vermont PBS station. For 22 seasons, he’s been painting and whispering his way to local fame if not fortune. Carl lives in a customized 1970s van called “Vantastic” and wears his hair and clothes in styles that are straight out of the same decade.
With his odd charm and confidently breezy demeanor, he’s also seduced his way through most of his female co-workers at the station. When the station hires a young female artist (Ciara Renée) to host a competing painting show, everyone suddenly realizes how antiquated Carl’s art and mannerisms have become. Carl has to face the future and his place in it.
Paint takes place in a world that reminded me of Napoleon Dynamite in many ways. Ostensibly taking place in the present, the furniture, clothes, and locations recall an earlier time. And not just Carl’s. It seems as if everyone in the town has a console television and oddly colored or paneled walls. And like the characters in that earlier film, the characters of Paint seem to live in their own reality. None of them are particularly well-drawn and, frequently, their actions are impulsive to the point where I wondered if I’d missed something. (I hadn’t.)
Thankfully, Wilson’s Carl and Michaela Watkins’ Katherine comprise the focal point of the film. Their performances make the best of what they’re given script-wise. The creative decision to dole out the details of their characters’ relationship in flashbacks makes it unnecessarily difficult to understand their reactions in early scenes. Once things became clear in the third act, I wished I’d had more information earlier on. Not that anything about their relationship — or anything else about Paint, for that matter — is hard to figure out. It just feels like writer/director Brit McAdams is trying to be clever with the narrative at the expense of clarity.
Mildly amusing and intentionally quirky, Paint is never laugh-out loud funny. It has some inspired moments but never seems to find its footing.
2.5 out of 5.0 stars
