As a devoted fan of the PBS painting guru Bob Ross, whose landscape-painting instructional program The Joy of Painting ran on the station for an astonishing 31 13-episode seasons between 1983 and 1994, I was all-in when I heard that Owen Wilson would be playing a character based on the soft-spoken, perm-topped creator of countless almighty mountains, majestic trees, and happy little clouds. Wilson’s stock comic persona, a naïve optimist with a streak of melancholy and a permanent air of being ever-so-slightly stoned, seemed like a natural match with Ross’ particular brand of eccentric wisdom: Is there another actor you can imagine convincingly delivering the line “There’s nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend,” or priming a canvas while accompanied by his pet, Peapod the Pocket Squirrel? The recently exhumed story of the alleged exploitation of Ross’ name by his longtime business partners—the subject of the 2021 Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed—offered the possibility that a Bob Ross biopic might be more than a goofy sendup of the beloved brush-wielder; it could be the tragicomic story of an indefatigably sincere man trying to practice his art in a cold and unethical world.
But the most important thing to know before seeing Brit McAdams’ strangely blurry comedy Paint is that it is not really a Bob Ross biopic, comic, tragic, or otherwise. Paint’s lead character, Vermont-based TV painter Carl Nargle (Wilson), may share Ross’s spherical hairdo and gentle hippie demeanor. He may even guide his viewers through the creative process with the same transfixing blend of earnest self-help speak and spacy non sequiturs. But McAdams (who also wrote the screenplay, which way back in 2010 landed on the roundup of most liked but never-produced projects known as the “Black List”) seems to want to use Ross mainly as a stylistic template, an idea of a type of guy that it might be funny to write a movie about. Sadly for all concerned, above all the eternally game Wilson, Paint is not that movie. Bob Ross fans looking for insight into the complexities behind the placid face of a man who once said he spoke softly so as to forget the constant screaming he had been required to do as an Air Force sergeant training new recruits will be puzzled and disappointed to see such a sui generis cultural figure used as little more than an embroidered-Western-shirt-clad scarecrow on which to hang a frustratingly skimpy plot about the professional and romantic rivalry between two would-be small-screen Seurats.
After decades of onscreen painting, Carl Nargle has become a fixture in the Vermont cultural firmament. A reporter from the Burlington Bonnet who visits the set to interview him tells him he is fourth on the publication’s upcoming list of local treasures, “tied with snow.” And in a running joke that works only because Wilson’s innate sweetness makes it impossible to see him as creepily predatory, Carl can also get it on with pretty much any local lady who catches his eye, especially when she gets a gander at the nifty fold-down bed in the orange camper van Carl has outfitted with “PAINTR” vanity plates.
Carl did once have a shot at true love, revisited in soft-focus flashbacks: the PBS station’s assistant manager, Katherine (Michaela Watkins), who broke off their affair when she found him in the tricked-out Chevy love nest with another woman. They continue to work together, both still secretly pining, while their anxious boss (the always great Stephen Root) brainstorms about how to turn around the station’s declining ratings. In a bid to increase audience engagement during the yearly round of fundraising, he hires another TV painter, the younger and more dynamic Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), to start her own show. Ambrosia’s taste leans toward the surreal rather than the picturesque. (Her first time on air, she produces an image she identifies as “a UFO covered in blood.”) Carl is offended when audiences respond well to Ambrosia’s oil-on-canvas stylings, and soon the two daubers are competing not only for prime public-TV airtime but for the affection of the neurotic but endearing Katherine.
Paint deliberately seeks to make a joke out of the lowness of these dramatic stakes, reminding us over and over that the mild-mannered world of Vermont public television is a far cry from the Sturm und Drang of most onscreen portraits of artistic rivalry. (Think Amadeus, but with pledge-drive tote bags.) This could have been the setup for a terrific workplace comedy if McAdams’ script didn’t seem at every turn to blunt the edge of its own satire. About half an hour in I found myself wondering what exactly this gentle comedy was supposed to be sending up: the petty narcissism of small-town celebrities? The self-seriousness of wannabe artists convinced that their sunset-tinged landscapes and two-bit De Chirico impersonations are worthy of hanging in a museum, rather than on the wood paneling over their mom’s couch? To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.
To his great credit, Owen Wilson, who has spent a whole career specializing in just this type of cheerfully oblivious, tirelessly self-confident holy fool, almost makes this chiffon-weight movie worth watching through the sheer force of his doofy charisma. Had the script only given him a chance, Wilson is comedian enough (and, as other roles he’s played reveal, leading man enough) to have turned the real Bob Ross into an unlikely romantic hero. Maybe we’ll still get that biopic someday—and if God’s in his heaven, it’ll also include a cameo from Peapod.
