Customer Reviews

My Kid Could Paint That

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This documentary exposes, in a very objective manner, the manipulations of the "art world," the media and a very young child by parents.

Parents are ultimately charged with assuring the well-being of their offspring. This is a not-for-profit endeavor. I was as disturbed by the actions of these parents as I am by the pushy stage mothers who dress their daughters up as mini-adults and parade them on stage to win pageants. I perceive that the father in this story would be just as easily at home on a Little League field bullying an umpire as well as engineering this greed and publicity driven scheme.

My heart was also aching for the little brother. The scene depicting him pulling on his father's chair, seeming to beg for attention by announcing that he also painted while "in his mother's belly" spoke volumes.

I viewed the father as a strutting peacock who glories in the exploitation of this situation, and squirmed with discomfort as I watched the mother seem to gain sudden "awareness" while watching the televised expose. When that dawn came, it did nothing to bring the exploitation to an end. The documentary later shows her tearfully regretting what has transpired, but this masterpiece of manipulation and exploitation continues. Therefore, I hold her just as culpable as the father, who is the ring-master of this sad circus.

What is tremendously clear in this documentary is that this situation had become quite disturbing, that this negativity was abundantly clear to the parents, and that they fostered the continuation of the exploitation.

This is a brilliant and objective but very disturbing film.

Really liked the movie. In it, the art critic and (I think) the filmmaker said that all art is a lie. Well, I disagree with that - good art is a window to the truth. A good film will be able to penetrate behind the layers of deception. This one did.

Just before the part where the parents were watching the 60 Minutes report on Marla, the first time doubts about her ability were brought up, I said to myself that I had not seen anything that the child did showed me that she could do those paintings. When showing her painting, her level of concentration was extraordinarily short (though typical of a 4 year old,) she stabbed and poked at the canvas. She wanted to play.

So the Olmsteads ended up doing their own video of her doing a painting called Ocean because she would never paint with the mastery of the high priced paintings whenever an outsider was filming. (That happened five times.) In the special features follow-up, one guy said Ocean didn't look like the others. Being into art, that was an understatement. She ends up painting in Ocean what looks like a Mickey Mouse representation. Look at the circle representing "Mickey's" head. Then look at all the other almost perfect circles that fill up some of her other earlier paintings. Look at all the solid, steady wide brushstrokes that encompass the other very large paintings like Triptych. Look at the long, steady drips on the paintings (one painting, on the follow-up feature has a "V" where each arm is three feet long) compared with the jagged ones on Ocean.

There's another painting where a collector says that one part of it looks like a pathway to a door. Look at how smooth, steady and solid the wide brushstrokes are that are completely absent in Ocean or in any video of her painting. On the cover of the DVD right here, look at those very long straight, even, smooth "drip" lines and again compare that to Ocean.

Near the end of the video there's a scene where she's painting on the floor, within a couple of minutes she TELLS her father 5 times to paint or to help her. This little 5 year old doesn't ask him to paint with her, she says paint or I won't do anymore.

Watch her paint (she is quite talented actually) and ask yourself, does she have the physical and mental ability to paint those very large paintings shown at the beginning of the film?

Mark Olmstead insists throughout the film that she painted everything without any help. NO WAY.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)

This documentary ends with the credits rolling down the screen and Bob Dylan singing "Everything's gonna be different When I Paint My Masterpiece." The sense of yearning and a kind of dissatisfaction with what you know that life is going to bring that Dylan expresses in his song is the way so many parents feel about their children. They want everything for them. They want to give them advantages they never had. They see in their children the good genetic parts of themselves and their spouses (and in-laws!) and yet sometimes they want to yell at themselves: Stop that! Let the child be. Let the child be a child.

This is the way Laura Olmstead no doubt felt about her daughter Marla. Four-year-old Marla loved to paint and seemed to have some kind of unusual facility for color and expression. Her paintings came out like little works of art, and then bigger works of art, and then suddenly they were selling for tens of thousands of dollars and little Marla was having art shows in New York City.

Abstract impressionism is considered by some to express the inner workings of our consciousness, to describe in form and color a deep artistic and human truth. To others it is a scam. Mark Olmstead, Marla's father--not exactly an ingénue when it comes to art--encouraged his daughter in her work. He bought paints and took the time to be with her while she was painting. At some point he began to put the canvas on the floor. Occasionally he allows (late in the documentary) that he taught her to PULL the brush, not push it. But he swears he never finished or touched up her work.

Marla became famous and the family garnered some $300,000 from her paintings, with millions more offered if and when she would paint some more. Laura had misgivings, was uneasy, but she wasn't sure why. Mark saw no downside. Little red dots appeared beside her paintings at show, indicating that the paintings had been sold. Indeed all her paintings had sold. Curiously a friend named Anthony Brunelli, ironically himself a painter working in photo realism, which I suppose is as far as you can get from the abstract, served as a sometime broker and dealer. It was as though the artist, four-year-old Marla had indeed painted her masterpiece and was living the life of a princess in a fairytale.

And then came a "Sixty Minutes" piece on Marla the prodigy showing her at work. But somehow something wasn't quite right. A child psychologist was interviewed who had looked at the video and said that it didn't look like this child was doing anything that a normal child of her age wouldn't do, and intimated further that you could clearly see the father's guiding hand. The implication was that Mark had "finished" the paintings or had authored them himself!

Marla is a pretty and vivacious little girl. Her mother seems the very embodiment of common sense. Mark seems like a loving and nurturing father. But they become targets of hate mail. Amazing. A segment of the public believes that the parents are scam artists and have bilked a gullible public.

Enter documentary film maker Amir Bar-Ley. He convinces the Olmsteads to allow him into their home with the idea that while making his documentary he will film an entire sequence with Marla at work on one of her masterpieces from start to finish with no help from Dad or anybody else to prove that she is genuine. What we see at times is a reluctant Marla who wants her dad to draw a face or to suggest something.

Mark is caught, not in a lie, but in the logic of his situation. Yes, he had to have "helped" her and there is no doubt (at least to this observer) that in some of the works he guided her choice of colors and painting instruments, which would only be natural. But in the esoteric world of art collecting, if that is admitted, the value of her paintings would plummet. Not only that, but Marla's integrity as a prodigy and his reputation as someone presenting her art, would be compromised as well. So he is caught. And so also is Laura, who wants to tell us that she would love to take a lie-detector test to prove that she in no way misrepresented her daughter's work or her involvement in it.

Whether Mark went further than guiding her is a question that the documentary leaves open to interpretation. The one work shown as completely Marla's (as evidenced by its composition being recorded on film) called "Ocean" may be seen as not on the same level of achievement as her other works. Again this is a matter of interpretation.

In a sense this is also a story about people who buy abstract art for high prices. It is about the vanity of collectors.

How does it end? See for yourself, but of course it may not end until Marla is old and her parents are gone, and even then, what really happened, and what it really means is--as is always the case with art--a matter of interpretation.

(For what it's worth, I have little doubt that Marla was "marketed" especially by her father and Anthony. Just ask yourself, who chose the names for the paintings, "Ode to Pollock," Asian Sunrise," etc.? Not Marla, that is for sure. And when Marla says, I'm done. It's your turn, Dad, I think we get the picture. But I would tar with the brush of "human, all too human" only Mark, Tony and the art collectors, not Laura who knew they would be compromised in some way, and of course not little Marla who was as pure as gold throughout.)

This is a fascinating documentary for anyone interested in art and the deeper questions about art and the art world. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the film and the philosophical questions it raises.
When the parents of 4-year old Marla Olmstead begin to sell her abstract paintings, the questions and the investigations begin (interestingly it is not really the painting of the art that seems to be the issue, but the selling of it). Is Marla a prodigy? Is the only difference between her artwork and that of other 4-year olds the fact that she is getting thousands of dollars for hers? What does it mean to say a 4-year old "created" a painting? Was she "coached," or "encouraged" by her father? Does that really matter? The human interest aspect of this film is enjoyable, but the deeper questions it raises about the nature of art, and the reaction of the media and individuals to art, are even more fascinating. The reflections offered by Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times chief art critic, are especially thought-provoking.
The extras included with the film are not to be missed, for they go even deeper into the philosophical questions, and add much to the basic story presented in the film itself.
Highly recommended!

*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.

This is a top tier, thouroughly engaging and thought provoking documentary. It macroscopicly presents a deceptively complex story with ample footage, competent perspectives and brave attempts at finding answers. The flexibility and perservearance of this project is commendable. This could not have been an easy one.

A young and naive film maker followed natural curiosity into what appeared to be the "Holy Grail" of the Human Interest story... He finds an innocent 4 year old girl tacked down as bait to the lid of Pandora's box. I am reminded of some old sayings about "evil", how it never appears in the gruesome monster skin we are inclined to invision... Intelligent people I have met in my life have told me that "children often speak the truth". Our human instincts love to trust books by their covers and this is what evil preys on. In the end, I found this story compellingly interesting and incredibly sad. I feel the most sadness for the younger brother, Zane. Watching his footage the second time through is very very sad. Those kids did not deserve this.

Amar Bar-Lev's new documentary, "My Kid Could Paint That", is ostensibly about the "career" of 4-year old (not a typo) Marla Olmstead, who hit the MSM spotlight briefly a few years back when her abstract paintings became a surprise hit in the New York art world. I use the qualifier "ostensibly", because by the time the credits roll, you realize that this film goes much, much deeper than standard issue news-kicker fodder about yet another child prodigy. As one of the film's subjects, a reporter for a local newspaper, muses to the filmmaker, "...this story is really more about the adults (in Marla's orbit)."

The back story: Mark and Laura Olmstead, a young couple living in sleepy Binghamton, New York, begin to notice that their daughter, Marla, appears to have a knack for art that transcends the random scribbling of a typical toddler. To be sure, every parent likes to think their kid is a bloody little genius, but the Olmsteads receive validation when a friend suggests they hang some of Marla's work in his local coffee shop (for a lark) and to their surprise, the paintings start selling like hotcakes. A local newspaper reporter picks up on the story, as does the owner of a local art gallery. Then, faster than you can say "just out of diapers", young Marla becomes a media darling, resulting in a substantial spike in the value of her paintings (some are sold in the five-figure range). Everything is going quite swimmingly until "60 Minutes" sets their sights on the family, airing a "takedown" story in 2004 that includes hidden camera footage showing Mark Olmstead barking instructions at Marla as she paints. Needless to say, sales drop off dramatically.

Bar-Lev began filming prior to the "60 Minutes" story; hence the first act is fairly standard documentary fare, incorporating interviews with the parents, the gallery owner and the newspaper reporter with some of the family's home movies. You do get a vibe early on that Mark Olmstead is enjoying the spotlight more than the rest of his family; Marla is way too young to really understand what's going on, and his wife Laura retains a cautious pragmatism. "I know there's a fine line between a child prodigy and a freak show..." she says at one point. Even while she is backstage getting prepped for Marla's appearance on the "Tonight Show", she worries out loud "...if all of this is really good for Marla". Is she telling this to the camera, or taking a by-proxy jab at her husband?

The first real seeds of doubt are sown when Bar-Lev sets up his camera to capture Marla at work. Marla sits on the floor, staring an empty canvas for quite some time while her father fidgets. At one point, Marla says something very interesting. "Do you want to paint something, Daddy?" Whoops! "I don't know what's wrong," Mark says nervously, "She usually doesn't act like this..." Uh huh. The awkward moments are just beginning between the filmmaker and his subjects, and the stage is set for one of the most compelling third acts I've seen in a documentary in quite a while.

At the end of the day, "My Kid Can Paint That" is not just about whether or not Marla is for real; it's about the nature of "art" itself (be it painting, filmmaking, music, whatever) At what point does childish scribbling become "abstract expressionism"? Does a "documentary" become a lie the moment the filmmaker makes the first edit? Whose judgment determines the intrinsic and/or monetary value of a painting-a local newspaper reporter, a New York Times art critic or Mike Wallace? Does the eye of the beholder still count for anything? Does it really matter who painted it, if you feel it's worth hanging on your wall? Who wrote Shakespeare's plays-Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford, and do you care? Does it really matter that the Monkees didn't write any of their hits or play their own instruments? Feast your eyes on this exceptional film and decide for yourself.

This is what good documentary film should be, like what Spurlock did in Super Size Me or Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?. Amir Bar-Lev one up's Spurlock by being much more objective with his film. This film has really fine balance between both sides, is it a fake and Dad really painted them, or is it real and Marla really painted those pictures?

Simply watching the theatrical or Sundance release of this film, was pretty satisfying, left me thinking mostly about real or fake. In fact it prompted a fair amount of discussion over the two days it took me to finish this movie.

The really big win here is in the bonus features. Altogether they are almost a second film. The revisiting of the town a few years later, some unused footage, the reaction of people in the film to watching themselves, a fantastic discussion of what is art by that wonderful New York Times art critic. These pieces all enriched the film for me. And, threw the whole question into even further doubt. Amir Bar-Lev does not try to answer the question for the viewer, but expands their knowledge further equally on both sides of the topic.

With the good documentaries nominated for 2009 Academy Awards, maybe people will be interested in a really fine documentary from a few years ago.

My Kid Could Paint That tells the true story of how a four year old girl named Marla Olmstead took the art world by storm when her paintings became highly respected in the world of modern art. Indeed, the vast majority of Marla's paintings look quite professional; and I think she uses her lack of inhibition when the camera isn't around to make some pretty incredible works of art. The documentary is nicely done by director Amir Bar-Lev; and the story of Marla, her family, and their roller coaster ride to fame, fortune, accusations of fraud and back to fame again is quite impressive. This film will stimulate you to really think about Marla as a real artist or a child coached and helped by her father.

We see Marla rise quickly to fame at the tender age of four. Already her paintings have been sold for nine thousand dollars or more; and her father is particularly proud of her. You get the impression that Marla's dad, Mark Olmstead, is not unlike a pushy stage mother who wants their child to succeed especially because the child is doing what the parent tried to do and couldn't do very well. Marla's mother, Laura Olmstead, enjoys her daughter's fame--and that growing college tuition fund--but also worries greatly that Marla will be negatively affected by all this years later. Marla's mother has a genuine concern that Marla's father lacks--she truly does want Marla to have a childhood.

Things go relatively well until a Charlie Rose expose on "60 minutes" raises a lot of concern that Marla is indeed doing all of the painting herself. Suspicions arise that perhaps Marla's father has secretly "helped" her by doctoring the paintings privately. The family gets lawsuit threats and sales of Marla's paintings dry up at once. The family tries to fight back and by the end of the film we see Marla's works having another art show in Binghamton two years later when Marla was six years old.

I won't draw any final conclusions here; naturally I cannot be certain of what happened when the cameras were off. However, I highly recommend the extras on this DVD; in particular, I liked the 35 minute featurette entitled Back To Binghamton. Back To Binghamton was filmed more recently in 2007; and it adds color (pardon the pun) to this issue and the family dynamics in the Olmstead household. I also felt very badly for little Zane, Marla's younger brother, who is clearly feeling bad that Marla is getting all the attention and he gets much, much less attention than she does. When the father says that Zane's paintings won't be in any art show, a very quick look at Zane's face shows him grimacing; and Zane tries to get the cameraman's attention by telling him that he (Zane) was painting in the womb when his mother was pregnant with him.

Was the art world duped? Has the father or someone else helped Marla or doctored her paintings? Is this all Marla's work? These are questions for debate and I think that's good.

Overall, My Kid Could Paint That is an outstanding and thought provoking documentary. We even see director Amir Bar-Lev beginning to express his own doubts about Marla's genius near the end of the film; and local reporter Elizabeth Cohen expresses her regret that she ever started the "mess" by writing a story about Marla in their local newspaper. I highly recommend this film for people who like documentaries; and people in the modern art world especially should see this film. This motion picture is also a "must-see" for people studying the effects of "stardom" on young children.

I too watched the movie, all the extras, and then watched the movie itself AGAIN with the commentary track. So well constructed!