My Kid Could Paint That
Starring: Marla, Zane, Mark and Laura Olmstead; Amir Bar-Lev, Elizabeth Cohen and Anthony Brunelli
Directed by: Amir Bar-Lev
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Rated: PG-13
New York Frito-Lay plant worker Mark Olmstead was an aspiring painter in his spare time. Watching her father paint, his toddler daughter Marla asked him if she could paint, too. Rather than patting her on the head and showing her the television, he set her up with paints and brushes and let her work alongside him. By the time she was four, she had completed a number of abstract paintings that Mark and his wife Laura were very proud of. When a friend saw some of Marla’s paintings hanging up around the house, he asked if he could hang some in his café. Before long people were asking to buy the paintings, which began showing in galleries. Marla was hailed as a child prodigy, and her work fetched several thousand dollars per piece in the strange, insular New York art world. In My Kid Could Paint That, filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev explores the strange phenomenon of Marla Olmstead. Though a bit over-stuffed with extraneous interviews, this bizarre documentary is worth a look for curious audiences.
Bar-Lev was cautious about approaching the Olmsteads to make a movie about Marla; they had already been covered extensively on network television and it was getting increasingly difficult to maintain a normal life. However, the family welcomed a long-term filmmaker working with them over the course of several months as an alternative to the TV news crews who were only around Marla for a few hours before disappearing forever.
At first, My Kid Could Paint That seems a sweet family documentary — not unlike anything one might see on the TLC network. Marla is charming, her parents are loving and the family seems altogether nuclear and complete. This is all vaguely cute, but as the film begins to broach the nature of abstract art, openly exploring metaphysics and the financial business of creativity, Bar-Lev stalls. He isn’t shedding any light on a topic that has been thoroughly examined countless times by artists, journalists and critics of every conceivable shade.
Things begin to fall apart for the Olmsteads when CBS does a segment on Marla for 60 Minutes, raising questions as to whether or not Mark may have had an active role in finishing Marla’s paintings. The family is criticized for exploiting Marla and the demand for her paintings begins to dissolve. At this point, Bar-Lev allows himself as filmmaker to come to the fore, actively questioning the Olmsteads. In this last half hour, the film transcends its subject mater and offers a glimpse into the nature of documentary filmmaking. Bar-Lev’s camera catches print journalists furiously taking notes and photos as the Olmstead’s watch the 60 Minutes segment in their living room. It’s chilling to see television, film and print media bounce off each other and ricochet around two ostensibly normal people casually watching TV.
This film at its most compelling when Bar-Lev explores the Olmsteads and their relationship with publicity. But with a run time of about an hour and a half, it hardly feels complete enough for a feature-length documentary. In footage culled from an evening drive after the fateful 60 Minutes episode aired, Bar-Lev, in his first solo appearance on camera, mentions that he’s not certain what he’s doing with the documentary anymore. Perhaps he didn’t get enough footage to make the kind of film that he really wanted to, and thankfully most of the film holds a great deal of interest – but there must’ve been enough footage to construct a film with far less dead weight. VS
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