Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson) is the premier painter on Vermont’s public broadcasting network with a specialty in painting landscapes.  Needing to bring in more revenue to the station, the show’s time slot is extended, and a young new painter is introduced, Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), who promises two paintings an hour.  A rivalry begins to brew between the two creatives, intensified when Ambrosia enters into a relationship with Carl’s flame, Katherine (Michaela Watkins).  Without Katherine, and with his ratings dwindling, Carl soon finds that the network he called home for thirty years no longer has a place for him in their programming. 

Brit McAdams writes and directs the quirky comedy, Paint, which received a theatrical rollout from IFC Films.  The 96-minute film teases out a simple concept to the absolute end of its limits, so while it opens with a bit of rustic charm, by the end it has more than worn out its welcome.   

The biggest issue with Paint is the overall tone of the film; one that feels like an overlong, meanspirited, and ultimately unfunny SNL sketch.  With Carl clearly modeled after Bob Ross given the iconic perm haircut and how he talks about the various natural elements in the vistas he is painting, Carl’s actions seem to run counter to the image and the spirit of Ross’ legacy in the public perception.  Though Ross had multiple marriages in his lifetime – one ending in divorce over allegations of infidelity – the Ross Estate has largely kept the more personal details of his life private, as the painter did in life.  Paint feels like a circumvention around the estate to tell this story instead of creating a more lighthearted biopic of the public broadcasting star in the same vein as Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) for Fred Rogers. 

What makes matters worse for the film is that all of the humor is one note, and further, all of the characters are working in this same jolly, country bumpkin affectation that becomes increasingly grating with each passing setup.  It is broad strokes in the worst sense so that these production assistants all blur into the background without much setting themselves apart from each other; it is just the same high-pitched droning where the humor attempts to be derived at from the goofy and strained facial expressions of the women dotting over Carl in hushed and anxious voices.  One of the central setups is that the women all have their night with Carl when he gives them a painting, and it is played up like it is much more sexual in nature, and as such these women wander around the studio like he is the chief of their harem and Paint is at its lowest point when McAdams is writing it like a sex comedy that has been edited down for prime time.  

The messy tone leaves Wilson with next to nothing to work with and he delivers an underdeveloped and confused performance that is impossible to track.  McAdams writes him as an innocent painter, but the setups are so misogynistic in nature that it is nothing but uncomfortable to watch unfold on screen.  Wilson is also so bogged down by the physicality of the character that he is unable to stretch as an actor or a comedian so there is little he can do to save the role. Riding on the quickly expired schtick of the character, Paint has played its hand within the first ten minutes, leaving audiences stuck for the remainder of the run time with little else to offer. 

Besides just the tone, Paint is also a mess of time and place that leaves the cast confused about how to act. The settings are all heavily inspired and designed to look like 80s sound stages, and cheap ones at that. This is all fine and good, but Paint is still set in the present day which makes it seem that this supposed-to-be zany cast of characters are stuck in some sort of time bubble. There is no daring on behalf of McAdams on the page to comment on current society by drawing conclusions from this clearly intentional setup. He is also not using it to comment on the underfunding of public broadcasting – treating the subject as a joke, programming only consumed by the elderly held captive in the main living area of their nursing homes – nor does he use the dated technology as a way to challenge himself as a writer of scenarios. These choices serve no real purpose and the few instances where modern technology is referenced, like with cell phones, it becomes jarring. Without a straight man or a singular oddball character to center the film around, the film is constantly treading water whereas a smarter script could have utilized all these same sets as part of an otherwise modern – or at least circa 2000’s – studio that is desperately seeking to please Carl’s ego as he is their only steady revenue stream by giving in to using the outdated tech for his segments of their programming. 

Without much of an idea to even go off of, it is hard to say that Paint was a failed attempt, instead it was just a failure through and through. It is even a struggle to say that its heart was in the right place because so much of the film is done in bad faith with humor that punches down, and though it does end on a supposedly happy note, the characters are all so bland and unlikeable, the best part about the ending is that it is finally over. It is a misguided and unfocused film, that, worst of all, is also unfunny and desperately needed to be reworked from the ground up or altered in such a way that Carl was a bit part of a larger story of a flailing network trying to keep up with the times. As presented, it is an uncomfortable and unpleasant film to endure.