My Kid Could Paint That

Saw My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about Marla Olmstead, a 4-year-old who paints very pretty abstract paintings ala Jackson Pollock. Her star rises as small-town papers bring attention from national and international news organizations until Charlie Rose on 60 minutes does a piece on her bringing into question just how uninvolved her parents are. Her father can be heard off-camera giving her instructions. Her pieces that are produced on-camera are scribble-y and childish. Her exhibit pieces are smooth, even, balanced, and polished. Her parents (who seem like incredibly sweet and sincere people by the way) insist that she just gets camera-shy. Even the filmmaker cannot bring himself to condemn them but nor can he bring himself to believe them.

The film begins with the documentary-maker giving Marla the camera. "Interview me," he says, "you hold the camera and interview me." As the film wears on and it becomes clear that the filmmaker has seen nothing to silence his doubts, the film pivots to be about him and about story-telling in general. One art critic for the New York Times says "All story-telling is a lie. Even your documentary is just going to be your telling of events." And then, in a moment of perfect poetic irony, he realizes that he ruined the take by laughing and repeats that point again word-for-word. Even the interview, the film seems to point out, is a lie.

This is an interesting, post-modern take on a story about modern art. In the first act of the film we're told that the story got traction because it gets at a long-running controversy over whether modern abstract art is even worth a damn. There's a pervasive feeling that all of these solid-colored canvasses and splashes of paint are a hoax of some kind. A child can do it. This potential hoax is compounded by the potential hoax of the child prodigy, coached and directed by her parents. This in turn is given a final twist by the documentarian who believes these sweet people but who has to admit that he sees no proof.

The film ends on a deeply ambiguous note. Like F for Fake and Rashômon, we get further and further into ambiguities the more we search. Eventually, we must confront the fact that all narratives are a hypothesis-fitting exercise. Dismissing some facts and magnifying others. We must believe the lie we can live with. But this is the conclusion of a filmmaker wracked with guilt, this is a lie perhaps that he can live with. An interesting film.