The Most Owen Wilsonish Ever: “Paint” (2023)

Okay, I’m not so sure that “Paint” is the most Owen Wilsonish movie (“Pineapple Express”? Let me know what you think covers that base); but it does showcase his laconic, not slow-burn exactly, but deliberate approach to building a character.

Wilson plays Carl Nargle, a Burlington, Vermont, Bob Ross type painter whose show on the local PBS affiliate is a local hit. We follow him as a local legend until he’s supplanted by Ambrosia Long, a young firebrand of a painter who paints two (!) paintings per half hour to Carl’s one covering a variety of motifs, and subjects (including a flying saucer deluging a forest path with blood). Played by Ciara Renée (Hawkgirl from “The Flash”!!!), Ambrosia is as open and whipsmart as anyone could ask for in terms of revitalizing moribund properties. 

NOTE: “PBS” here is not an acronym for “Public Broadcasting Service”; the “Service” is replaced by “Syndicate”, but everything else is so reminiscent of local PBS programming, I almost expected Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon to show up.

Carl is a study in a man out of time (the film itself feels frozen in the 1970s stylistically, despite references to Uber and cellphones). He reads as a quiet, laidback, and curiously un aging hippy. Eventually, he reveals himself to be a privileged, somewhat passive-aggressive or maybe just clueless, entitled sexist man. If he were only that and if Wilson weren’t the fine actor we know him to be, Carl would be insufferable. 

However, he really does seem to exist in his own world so wholly, that it’s difficult to take too harsh a stance on his foibles (particularly since he does get called out in the course of the film.)

The affiliate station is falling behind in ratings; hence, the hiring of Ambrosia, who quickly proves to be even more charismatic than Carl and whose hiring eventually leads to his dismissal from the station. 

The equally amazing Stephen Root plays the station’s GM and along what Katherine (a strong Michaela Watkins) seems to be one of those people who succeeds with the barest minimum of competence at the job. That’s unfair to Katherine who has risen from the ranks as receptionist to assistant GM and who we meet as she’s leaving to move to Albany to assume the General Manager role for the PBS station there. However, that’s scotched when Albany presses her on her lack of a college degree and rescinds the offer, but extend the option of a lateral move as assistant.

Katherine and Carl were involved decades before our story begins and both of their lives ground to a screeching halt when Katherine cheated on Carl and Carl returned the favor by bedding every woman at the station. If that sounds all-too-familiar well/over-trod ground, it’s handled here with some degree of delicacy and nothing in the way of smirking or rendering Carl as a predator. In fact, the farther along we go, the more passive Carl seems to grow in his relationships with, well, everyone. So where’s the “aggressive” in the passive-aggressive?

Where it often is. In the assertions that he doesn’t meant to hurt anyone, that he’s just living his life, and trying to move forward. But he hasn’t and he doesn’t. Over the course of the film’s brisk 90 or so minutes, we come to realize that both Katherine and Carl are trapped in stasis. Katherine has a fling with Ambrosia which is handled delicately and with gentle humor, but it’s not meant to last. To say more would spoil a movie that isn’t out yet. Even I have my baseline for this sort of thing.

The whole film is really a gentle, funny lark. It’s worth it alone for Wilson, Root, Renée, and Watkins, but all the supporting characters are endearingly quirky and at a specific juncture, endowed with no small degree of backbone and resentment that comes back on Carl. The exceptions are the guys at the barbershop where Carl gets his chia-pet-gone-wild coif tended to. There’s an easy rapport with the same repetitious shorthand of conversations in familiar phrases between Carl, his barber and the other regular.

I won’t go into any more detail, but there are lessons in here about what constitutes an artist, how we communicate (or don’t), and how, despite the world changing around us, sometimes change doesn’t always translate into growth for some.

Brit McAdams’ script has been on the Hollywood Black List of promising drafts since 2010. It seems nothing clicked until Wilson saw the script and signed on as executive producer. I’m really glad he did; he performs a turn worthy of his collaborations with Wes Anderson, nuanced and deadpan funny as needed and borderline sad, as well. 

Patrick Cady’s cinematography is also by turns low-key and in a remarkable set-piece, frankly, on fire. His sense of spaces and fluid camera movement lend the growth that the characters so stuck in place need so badly. The visuals work in tension with the characters growing through inertia and a soundtrack suffused with 70s hits from Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” to Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” and more. Again, this may be taking place now, but the sense of living in the past has rarely been as subtly realized.

McAdams’ direction is similarly efficient. Each scene builds on previous moments and as much as there are some genuinely hilarious moments, he never mocks or belittles his characters. It’s a truly heartfelt and gently sly movie.

It also answers the question: who is Banksy, really?

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