Paint

Grade: D+

Paint is a dull-as-dishwater dismal affair that lazily cluelessly stumbles through its hour and 36 minutes with its head in the happy little clouds. It’s one of those ideas that should have stopped in the idea phase. Or maybe just a Super Bowl commercial. Or an SNL sketch, where it would be over in a few minutes. “Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Owen Wilson played a Bob Ross type?” The premise is amusing, but they have not an inkling of what to do with it beyond that.

In 2010, it was featured on the Black List of that year’s most-liked unproduced screenplays. Now it’s one of my least-liked produced screenplays. It doesn’t seem to know when it takes place. The elaborate vans, the costumes, the phones with cords, the huge computers, and the abundance of John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot on the soundtrack, I’m guessing, would put us in the late 1970s. And yet, out of nowhere, a character proclaims “My Uber’s here.” The line goes over like a fart in a spacesuit.

Wilson’s character is fictional, but is obviously modeled after Bob Ross. He plays Carl Nargle. He is a soft-spoken painter with a beard, big hair, and a show on PBS, where he is known for painting mountains, trees, clouds, and the like. He has had several flings with female co-workers over the course of his 22 years on the air. He “takes [them] to a special place,” a phrase that he also tells his viewers in every episode. This movie is chock full of innuendos. Innuendo, in my endo, in everybody’s endo. They are more predictable and annoying than funny.

Paint appears to be writer/director Brit McAdams’s feature film debut that isn’t a documentary. Wilson, who also serves as an executive producer and undoubtedly had a creative hand in this, seems to have carried over the one-note deadpan vibe of all those Wes Anderson movies he’s appeared in. The Royal Tenenbaums was a triumph – one of my favorite movies of 2001. Everything Anderson has done since has been overbearing, cloying, and pretentious at worst – and “it had its moments” at best.

Owen Wilson is a considerable talent. There are good people in this film, especially relative newcomer Lucy Freyer, who I mainly mention as a “bookmark,” so I can remember to keep an eye on her career. Paint is playing in select theaters, and I support the selectiveness. I’d say it was dead on arrival, but I never felt like it arrived. What seems like a fun concept turns out to be the worst movie of 2023 so far.

And that Uber reference! Seriously!

Grade: D+