‘Paint’ Review: Owen Wilson Does a Riff on Bob Ross, the Kitsch Icon of PBS, in an Amusing, Undercooked Satire of Toxic Male Delusion
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson), the amusingly ironic hero of “Paint” (ironic because, as we discover, he’s about as far from heroic as you can get), hosts a one-man instructional painting show that gets broadcast live out of the PBS station in Burlington, Vermont. Each afternoon, Carl appears on camera for one hour, puffing on his pipe, holding his brushes and palette as he dashes off an oil painting of a local wilderness setting (snowy mountains, twilight vistas, trees), explaining all the while, in the unruffled monotone of a stoned hypnotist, how you too can get to a “special place” just by painting what’s in your heart. Carl himself seems nearly as much of an art object as his canvases of Mt. Mansfield, the Vermont peak he has begun to paint with OCD frequency. He wears the same denim Western shirts, fuzzy beard and ash-blond Afro that he’s been sporting since 1979. He’s a relic: the landscape painter as Fred Rogers for adults, a kind of soft-rock guru from the age when men were Mellow. The biggest TV celebrity in Burlington, he thinks he’s on top of the world, but he’s about to come tumbling down.