If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.
View ProfilesPublished April 12, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. | Updated April 12, 2023 at 10:09 a.m.
I have a handy Google alert set up to inform me about news stories involving Vermont and film. For the past eight months or so, I've been getting nonstop pings about this comedy in which Owen Wilson stars as "Vermont's No. 1 public television painter."
Was Paint shot in Vermont? No. (Saratoga Springs, N.Y., got the honors.) Did a Vermont story inspire it? No — the wispy-voiced protagonist is clearly based on Bob Ross, whose PBS show "The Joy of Painting" was filmed in Indiana. Is Paint set in Vermont because "Vermont" is Hollywood shorthand for "cute, quirky and behind the times"? Now I'm going to go with yes, although writer-director Brit McAdams has assured local interviewers that he has only the greatest respect for our state.
We Vermonters can take an extended joke at our expense, right? As long as it's funny...
For nearly 30 years, Vermonters have thrilled to the meditative joys of public TV personality Carl Nargle (Wilson), who takes viewers "to a special place" as he crafts landscapes starring Mount Mansfield. While his art is pedestrian at best, his whispery presence has a strange power, and the female staffers at the station flutter over him like groupies.
Despite Carl's popularity, the station's ratings are tanking, so management hires young, hip artist Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), who actually paints things besides Mount Mansfield, to supplement Carl. Overnight, Ambrosia becomes everyone's favorite. She wins over Carl's fans and even puts the moves on his ex, Katherine (Michaela Watkins), the station's general manager, with whom Carl may still secretly be in love.
Carl is facing competition for the first time in his career, and his midlife crisis is no pretty picture.
Paint gets at something real — a brand of manliness that flourishes mainly in lefty enclaves. With his curly mop, his sandals and sweaters, and his sensitive, new-age homilies, Carl might be mocked in a red state. But in Vermont, he's a stud, drooled over even by a young station employee (Lucy Freyer) who forsakes a lifetime of veganism to share a fondue pot with him.
With his woozy stoner charm, Wilson is a natural choice for the role, and he inhabits it fully. Never mind that Carl seems adrift in time, a member of Generation X who can't use voicemail and has never heard of Uber. In Vermont, such things are possible. We've all known Carl Nargles — the only thing missing from the portrait is a "Kill Your Television" bumper sticker.
Because there's truth at the heart of this caricature, there's also great comic potential — potential that, for the most part, remains unexploited. While Paint's costumes, production design and performances are on point, its screenplay is woefully thinly sketched out. The plot offers some fun twists, including a wild climax involving the reckless consumption of edibles in a barn. Yet the viewer struggles to care, because the characters remain on the drawing board.
I'm not saying that absurdist comedy characters should have the depth of Leo Tolstoy's, but they do need to have enough internal consistency to make us nod in amused recognition when they do something ridiculous. Why do Carl's die-hard fans immediately forsake him for Ambrosia, who lacks his soothing, soporific qualities? We don't know. What does Ambrosia herself want from a job at a dead-end public TV station? We never learn that, either; mostly, she just seems to be horny for every woman on staff.
Carl and Katherine are the only characters with something approaching inner lives, and even they don't always add up. Carl's libido, for instance, seems to wax and wane with the needs of a particular scene. Because of all the unknowns in the equation, we don't feel the tension of the pair's slowly rekindling romance or of Carl's conflicts with Ambrosia and station management. And because of that lack of momentum, the scenes begin to feel like disconnected skits that exist mainly to milk the inherent comedy of Carl's quirks.
Sure, it's mildly funny to watch Carl serving one of his dates soup in a bread bowl on a TV tray or expressing his dark night of the soul by covering a canvas with black. And his highest ambition — to have his work hung at the "Burlington Museum of Art" — is touchingly modest, much like Paint as a whole.
But modesty isn't enough to compensate for squandering such a rich premise. In real life, an artist's ego is a formidable force, even in a supposed cultural backwater. Asking us to swallow the anodyne message that all Carl really needs is love, Paint is ultimately as forgettable as one of his landscapes.
Waiting for Guffman (1996; rentable): In its extremely low-key exploration of a small-town subculture, Paint might remind viewers of this Christopher Guest mockumentary, though it doesn't hit the laughs as consistently.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004; Paramount+, Pluto TV, rentable): For many years, Will Ferrell was the undisputed king of building an entire zany comedy around a single zany character.
Man With a Plan (1996; try YouTube and your local library): For homegrown Vermont satire, watch John O'Brien's deadpan classic about a dairy farmer who runs for Congress. Actual farmer Fred Tuttle, who played the part, went on to defeat a recent transplant to Vermont in a real-life U.S. Senate primary — a publicity stunt that made him the toast of the talk shows.
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