Paint is an unhappy little accident
Peter Tonguette
Sometimes I think the health of the nation should not be judged by the strength of voter turnout or the willingness to do jury duty but by the popularity of Bob Ross.
After all, what could be more inherently democratic than Ross’s earnest conviction that, within every man, woman, and child with access to a television set, there resided a budding artist? Ross, whose program The Joy of Painting was originally shown on public television from 1983 to 1994, advanced the appealing notion that, by buying paints, an easel, and some stretched canvas, viewers could paint all manner of bucolic scenes: imposing mountain ranges, calm seas, peaceful farms, magnificent forests. Just take out your brush, tap, tap, tap, and accept the fact that, as Ross was famous for saying, there are no mistakes, merely happy accidents. No matter that your mountains might look like skyscrapers or that your farmhouse resembles a brown blob. Tune in next time, and maybe you’ll get it right.
Ross, who died in 1995, must be understood as part of the honorable American tradition of the pitchman promising ordinary citizens that which was once the provenance of the elite. Just as the Ronco food dehydrator gave customers the chance to make grocery store-quality beef jerky in their own kitchen, The Joy of Painting gave viewers the opportunity to create canvases even in the absence of artistic training or (ahem) talent.
Unfortunately, little of this populist spirit is captured in the new comedy Paint, which stars Owen Wilson as what is intended to be a parody of Ross, a public-television painting program host named Carl Nargle. Although Nargle shares with Ross an unkempt Afro, a wardrobe heavy on denim, and a companionable disposition, writer-director Brit McAdams’s film makes its own Ross-like figure out to be less folk hero and more flat-out loser. Imagine if the 2019 Tom Hanks film about (Mister) Fred Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, had been a mean-spirited joke at Rogers’s expense based on the expectation you, the viewer, thought the television host was a pitiable figure, and you will have an idea of what this misfire of a movie is like.
Ross’s The Joy of Painting is still finding new viewers on YouTube and in television reruns — including those who watch unironically, not just for camp value or ASMR content but for the painting tips. On the other hand, the fictional Nargle’s show, a nearly identical long-running program originating from PBS Burlington, is presented as being long past its heyday. After several decades on the air, Nargle’s show is said to appeal primarily to PBS Burlington’s “core, 65-plus audience.” The TV painter has become a relic, a nostalgia act, and a has-been. After all, how many near-identical renderings of Mount Mansfield can one artist produce?
The station, anxious to transition away from the nonchalant artiste, is trying to climb onto the bandwagon of a more au courant young rival, Ambrosia (Ciara Renee). In contrast to Nargle’s placid landscapes, Ambrosia seems to have derived inspiration from comic books or graphic novels or manga or something; one of her paintings features a blood-drenched UFO. Eventually, Nargle is scooted off the air and into a teaching gig at a local college, but the film fails to generate much empathy or interest in the painter’s plight.
The problem is simple: As played by Wilson, Nargle himself comes across as far weirder and much more unlikable than the quirky and lovable Ross. Nargle is a covert egomaniac. For example, in a truly unfunny sequence, he tediously purloins newspapers from driveways, one at a time, when a story is printed about his irrelevance. He drives around town in a van bearing the custom license plate “PAINTR,” from which he communicates to the outside world by whispering into a loudspeaker system. This is amusing once or twice but, like much of the film, soon grows tedious.
Although the film has a vaguely contemporary setting, Nargle’s fashion sense remains lodged in the Carter administration. His ungainly Afro calls to mind the wigs once worn by Phil Spector, and the pipe he smokes while painting looks like a prop left over from a Wes Anderson extravaganza. In fact, when he accepted this role, Wilson undoubtedly was thinking of his earlier triumph in Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, in which he played the cowboy hat-wearing, lasso-wielding Western novelist Eli Cash. But that inspired comic creation was charming (rather than annoying) because he was asked to carry just a handful of scenes rather than an entire motion picture.
Stranger still is the film’s presentation of Nargle as something of a ladies’ man, a perpetual seducer who seems to have carried on romances with most of the station staff, including station assistant manager Katherine (Michaela Watkins). It’s hard to discern the source of his attraction to the opposite sex. This is a film whose idea of a come-on is lines such as “Do you want to touch my sandals?” and “I have some oils in my purse. Shut the curtains.” Is the state of Vermont really so lacking in virile men that a goofball like Nargle is treated as a sex symbol, albeit a fading one?
In the third act, when Nargle chops off his long hair, indulges in some medical marijuana, and sits, blithely stoned, while his house (and life’s work) burns to the ground, we have come to adopt our would-be hero’s state of total apathy: We just can’t rouse ourselves to care about this stoner painter, his love life, or his legacy.
What a contrast to the real Bob Ross! Watching old episodes of The Joy of Painting, with their naive faith in the artistic abilities of the average public-television watcher, is almost enough to restore one’s faith in the American experiment. This movie, by contrast, is not even smart, sharp, or funny enough to restore one’s confidence in the still-flagging acting career of Owen Wilson.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.