Paint Review: Owen Wilson Channels Bob Ross in Fuzzily Drawn Nostalgia Wallow

In case the marketing material didn’t make it clear enough, writer-director Brit McAdams’s Paint is inspired by the iconic American painter and TV host Bob Ross. Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson) has the same mane of curly hair, gentle speaking mannerisms, and love of landscape painting. Also like Ross, Nargle is plagued by a history of infidelity. But because McAdams treats Nargle’s love of landscapes as a silly quirk, Paint doesn’t exactly let you believe that there’s anything special about either the real Bob Ross or his fictional counterpart.

Paint cutesily charts the descent of Carl from legend of public access to being relegated to the dustbin of the art world. Even though his small community of Burlington, Vermont, seems to hang onto his every stroke, Carl’s show, Paint with Carl Nargle, is rapidly losing viewership, and PBS Burlington’s head, Tony (Stephen Root), is panicked about the possibility of losing funding. To safeguard against that, Tony brings in a plucky young painter, Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), to do the same show immediately following Carl’s. Ambrosia’s style is much more spontaneous and wild (in her first broadcast, she paints a UFO hovering over a tree stump in the wilderness) and she quickly overtakes Carl as the network’s more popular show.

Carl’s prolonged fall from grace is exacerbated by revelations about his womanizing, which includes, first and foremost, vast overreaches and manipulations of his show’s producers, Wendy (Wendi McLendon-Covey) and Katherine (Michaela Watkins), the latter with whom he had a past relationship and still harbors feelings for. As his world crumbles around him, Carl leans harder on his fawning young assistant, Jenna (Lucy Freyer), and desperately tries to cling to his modicum of fame by scheming small, innocuous ways to kneecap Ambrosia.

Paint’s bevy of heavy-hitting comedic actors makes the film’s dry sincerity feel all the more like a head-scratcher. Watkins and McLendon-Covey are two sharp comedians, yet they’re wasted in one-dimensional roles. As good as they are, they cannot elevate a script chockablock with jokes as obvious as Carl, a fount of sometimes-intentional-something-not euphemistic language, obsessively painting the phallic Mount Mansfield—as in “man’s field”—every time he’s on air.

Ambrosia rightfully accuses Carl of “using his brush” to manipulate those around him, but the film’s sympathies are difficult to pin down. Carl is like Mozart to Ambrosia’s Salieri, and while it makes sense that the former would be so jealous of the latter’s more obvious talent, it doesn’t explain why Ambrosia is painted as being so vindictive. She pursues Katherine at one point, but it isn’t clear if she’s genuinely interested in her or if it’s some bizzare way of taking Carl down.

McAdams shows us Carl being openly accused by his entire staff of manipulating the women around him and of seeking validation through sex, but most of the characters pitted against Carl (with the possible exception of Katherine) are also opportunistic, hysterical, jealous and petulant. For one, Tony jumps at the first opportunity to get rid of Carl, even though they’ve been friends for over two decades. Meanwhile, Wendy is painted as categorically obsessed with Carl and therefore kind of impossible to take seriously as an accuser.

Maybe the film’s characterizations would have felt less wobbly, and its argument about women’s struggle against patriarchal power more convincing, if the filmmakers had created a more convincing sense of time and place. From its costumes to the retro studio where Paint with Carl Nargle is shot to its soft cinematography to its song choices (including Black Oak Arkansas’s “Hot and Nasty” and Heart’s “Barracuda”), the film feels as if it’s set during the real Bob Ross’s heyday, if not before. And then references are made to Dancing with the Stars and Shark Tank and it’s as if we’re being told that the story is set within spitting distance of the present day.

All that leaves Paint feeling like it doesn’t really have a full grasp of what it wants to say about men like Bob Ross and the scourge of misogyny in popular media. McAdams has ultimately made a film that, inadvertently or not, argues that we’ve gone too far with canceling legendary figures like Carl. Without the acerbic edge that might have turned the film’s comedy into something truly demented and worthy of the talents of many of its stars, or a clear opinion on its main subject, Paint fades out as nothing more than a fuzzily drawn nostalgic wallow.