*SPOILERS*
This is an excellent movie that is made even better if you figure out what is actually going on here. For while the film begins as a celebration of this girl's amazing talents, it quickly becomes an involving detective story much like Capturing the Friedmans - though one that ultimately inverts the trajectory of that film. Among many ironies and paradoxes in the film's treatment of modern art, the ultimate one may be that if you don't think through the evidence clearly the film itself becomes a similar kind of Rorschach test, eliciting dramatically opposed views of the film and especially the filmmaker. But make no mistake: the ambiguity is superficial. Especially with the fantastic bonus materials on the DVD, there is enough evidence to figure out what is really going on. The filmmaker is clearly torn between the academic film theories he embraces and foregrounding his own views. I have no such qualms about explicitly connecting the dots.
I presume familiarity with the movie. The central question is as follows: Did the father do these paintings, or the daughter, or some combination? The possible answers vary depending on which paintings one is talking about. For the paintings that initially made her famous, it is stated unequivocally by several people in the film that no one outside the family ever saw the girl painting. Thus, these paintings could have been done entirely by the daughter, entirely by the father (who is a painter), or some combination. After CBS' 60 Minutes II places a hidden camera (which the couple took two months to agree to), we see the first example of a painting definitely painted by the daughter - at least physically painted by her, a point to which I will return. This painting is pretty clearly seen as far inferior to her other works by everyone who discusses it in the film, including the parents. Now, "inferior" is not really the right word to use in this context, because there can always be someone with a different view of what constitutes interesting art. What is really at stake here is the clearly different style from her other works, and especially the fact that it much more closely resembles the art of other children her age (a point both obvious and explicitly stated by the children's art expert interviewed on CBS, one of three experts they consult who all agree). And the problems don't stop there: CBS also captures the father sternly commanding his daughter off-screen with lines such as, "Pssst .... Paint the red. Paint the red. You're driving me crazy. Paint the red." "If you paint, honey, like you were ... This is not the way it should be." (heard in the film; also see the CBS transcript, a link is provided from the "My Kid Could Paint That" Wikipedia site).
When Marla's reputation is at least partially restored, it is courtesy of a DVD made by the family of her painting the work "Ocean." This seems to show conclusively that only the daughter did the painting, and the work is clearly more in the style of her other paintings than the one done for CBS. While the whole video is not shown in the film, it almost certainly follows the pattern of the more recently documented paintings on Marla's website (which are short excerpts from longer films available only to collectors, though the principles involved would be the same for the longer versions). There are two crucial differences from the CBS taping: music is the only sound, and they are splicings showing only the moments when she paints at many different times. It also suffers from a limitation apparent in the CBS video, a frame that only encompasses the canvas, not what is going on in the room. These can be interpreted as aesthetic choices, but they also eliminate all information on one of the crucial factors exposed by the CBS video: the father coaching his daughter on what to paint. Two different people in the film and bonus feature, and implicitly the filmmaker, note that "Ocean" seems different from her more famous prior works: certain kinds of brush strokes in those earlier paintings are absent, and overall it has a more "primitive" childlike quality. Again, this is not to make a judgment about the quality or value of the piece as art, which is subject to individual judgment; it is, rather, to note that the piece does not have many of the qualities in the works that initially made her famous.
The facts presented above can be explained in one of two ways. By the father's explanation, the girl happened to do a poor painting for the CBS hidden camera, and she is so shy around cameras that she can only paint when they are absent. By the filmmaker's suggested view, the father has been at the very least co-painting with his daughter. According to this view (but not explicitly stated), "Ocean" is an improvement because the father could coach from the sidelines, if not directly paint himself. There are two main factors in defense of the parents' view: their absolute seeming sincerity, noted by the filmmaker and apparent in many key scenes in the film; and the "circumstantial" nature of the evidence against them. I will begin with the second point and return to the first.
After the CBS report, the filmmaker went back over his recordings and found, to his surprise, that what he had thought was clear footage of her painting instead revealed the dramatic differences in quality between painting caught on film and the completed paintings. As he notes in an article, "I was never able to film satisfactory footage of Marla Olmstead painting. When I wasn't around, she completed remarkable canvases larger than herself, with sweeping paint splashes and elaborate flourishes. But every time I tried to film her painting, Marla was distracted or unwilling." This went on for an entire year. Is she just remarkably shy around cameras, as her father suggests? Watch the film again and note how Marla is around cameras: she seems not to notice them at all, and is certainly entirely unrestrained by the presence of the filmmaker, who is frustrated at his inability to film her without her talking to him and breaking the "fourth wall."
If Marla had help, why has she never said this? Marla's remarkable lack of interest in doing or talking about art when anyone other than her parents are around offers part of an explanation. The film leaves this question mostly open, but the DVD bonus feature shows her painting while demanding repeatedly that her father help her. Her father, clearly rattled, tries to cover by saying that she's just acting like a child, and implicitly argues that making anything of this would amount to "gotcha" pseudo-journalism.
In defense of the parents one keeps returning to one main issue: their seeming absolute sincerity. Could such nice, sincere people really be, as one critic sarcastically put it, "supernaturally cunning con artists"? (Harvey review) One first must ask: are there any cases where they clearly do not tell the truth? Marla's parents state repeatedly that they never tried to promote their daughter's work or make their daughter famous, that it fell in their lap. The DVD bonus feature shows otherwise: a curator for a feminist art show discusses a letter (shown to viewers) she received from Mark Olmstead before his daughter was known, asking for inclusion of her work and including a ridiculous "artist's statement" clearly not written by Marla. Not the sort of thing one would forget.
Once it is clear that Mark Olmstead is willing to lie, and to put words in his daughter's mouth, the possibility of it all being an act becomes easier to believe. If he is a very good liar, what about his wife? In a key scene, the woman cries when the filmmaker reveals his doubts. There are three possibilities: her story is true and she is upset that the filmmaker is going to put her through the kind of public humiliation that followed the CBS story; she doesn't know that her husband helps her daughter paint (made at least conceivable by the fact that she and her husband work different shifts and say that they hardly ever see each other) and so thinks her story is true; or she is lying - but this does not mean she would have to fake crying. She would still be very upset that the filmmaker is not going to do what they stated earlier that they hoped he would do, namely to exonerate them. She would probably fear that the whole story would finally fall apart, as it almost did after the CBS expose.
No evidence other than direct documentation of the husband's involvement can officially count as more than "circumstantial." But when "circumstantial" evidence exceeds a certain point one would be foolish not to see where it leads. Nothing about my suggested account requires "supernatural" cunning, it requires only a father with some real painting talent (defined as ability to emulate the standards of successful modern art) and parents (just possibly only the father) with charm and the unswerving ability to lie well. In the age of Madoff and balloon boy, is this really so hard to believe?
This is not a film about the media needing a new narrative to keep a story going. It is a film about investigative journalism getting something right. Read the transcript of the Sixty Minutes II expose, this whole story should have ended there. And yet, if it weren't for the damage to other people's lives, one might say that the real work of art documented by the film is this brilliantly conceived and executed hoax. Regardless, it's not a pretty picture.