Paint

Movie Review

Carl Nargle is a Vermont treasure. There’s no doubt about it. The local paper in Burlington took a poll, and he landed at No. 4—tied with snow.

For decades now, Carl’s been painting his pretty little pictures on the local PBS affiliate—paintings of streams and trees, bushes and flowers, and most especially, Vermont’s Mount Mansfield. He takes his viewers to a “special place” on the show.

And when he’s not on camera? He has a special place there, too—a custom fold-out couch in his ever-so-‘70s van. He’s led many a woman back there. Who wouldn’t turn down a chance to spend some quality time with a Vermont treasure?

But times are changing, and perhaps the state isn’t quite as enamored with Carl’s scenic landscapes and ever-so-mellow vibe as it used to be. Sure, he’s still the biggest draw at PBS Burlington, but the station itself is struggling. Donations are down. Tote bags aren’t moving like they used to. And some of the executives in its florescent-drenched halls wonder whether it might be time for a tweak or two.

Count Katherine among them. Twenty-two years ago, Katherine was the first to fall to Carl’s oil-based charms, coming under the spell of his pigments and brushstrokes. They were an item for years before—well, we’ll get to that. Since then, Katherine’s watched as almost every woman at the station has gone to Carl’s “special place.”

Katherine is now the station’s assistant manager, but she’s leaving for greener pastures down south. And Carl? Well, Katherine will be relieved, if not happy, to leave him and his groupies behind. She’d like to leave the PBS station in good financial shape, too, if she can. And perhaps a little new blood just might help make that happen.

Enter Ambrosia, a painter who grew up watching Carl do his thing. She’s new blood, all right, and she’s willing to paint it, too—pouring out of a spaceship and onto a Vermont stump. It’s not the sort of scenic that Carl would paint, but the youngsters seem to like her.

And turns out, some of Carl’s fawning females gravitate to her, as well. Through her, they begin to see that maybe the sun doesn’t rise and set on Carl’s version of Mount Mansfield. Perhaps they deserve better.

Is it possible that Carl’s special place isn’t so special anymore?

Positive Elements

The Carl Nargle we meet in Paint is clearly patterned after Bob Ross, the late landscape painter who cranked out legions of pictures on TV filled with “happy little trees.” And while the quality of both Bob’s and Carl’s art is debatable, there’s little question that both provided hours of peace and enjoyment for their respective television audiences. Carl whisks his audiences away from nursing homes and dirty bars and into landscapes filled with life and color. And there’s something to be said about that.

But Paint is less about, y’know, painting, and more about priorities. Carl’s are completely out of whack when the film opens. But as he deals with crisis after crisis, he ultimately rediscovers the real artist locked deep in his soul, shedding both his vanities and insecurities. He becomes a better person, and that’s always a good thing.

Spiritual Elements

“I’m but the brush in God’s hand,” Carl tells a fan. Whether he believes it to be true seems questionable.

One of Carl’s old flings says that she wears tight leggings with the word “juicy” printed on the back—even to church. She says that the “good Christian children” there think it’s her name. “We’re praying for you, Juicy,” they say.

Sexual Content

Carl is (ahem) painted as a very mellow Don Juan: someone who charms women, and later carves notches in his bedpost. He’s a serial monogamist, never engaging in one-night stands but constantly flitting from relationship to relationship with little pause.

But how sexual those relationships get, well, that’s a bit of an open question.

We know that Carl and Katherine slept together: We see them in his van’s fold-out couch, bare shoulders poking out from under the covers. His later conquests are certainly besotted with Carl, and they talk about their past relationships with him in glowing terms. When one recounts her own romance with him (to Katherine, even though she begs her not to), she talks about how he gave her his “own special painting,” and we assume it’s a euphemism. But when we flash back to the night in question, he indeed hangs a painting of his in her living room. The closest we see them in intimacies is when he asks her if she’d like to touch his sandal.

Carl does accept a back rub from another paramour. She says that she has special oils she can use and asks him to close the van’s curtains. But if it progressed from there, the film is cagey about answering.

His current girlfriend is far younger than him and deeply infatuated. We see her trying to arouse his interest (kissing his neck and rubbing his chest), but Carl seems uncomfortable—and relieved when she has to run to the bathroom. She later asks him, point blank, why they never have sex.

Katherine, meanwhile, is seduced by Ambrosia. She lays an unexpected kiss on her, and Katherine agrees to have sex with her—admitting she’s never done such a thing with a woman before. (The moment becomes a bit awkward when Katherine meets Ambrosia’s parents, and realizes that Ambrosia’s mother went to high school with her.) It’s the only time we see them truly girlfriend-and-girlfriend, though their relationship does last throughout much of the movie. (Ambrosia also has another same-sex relationship.)

Another woman talks fairly graphically about what an intimate same-sex experience would feel like. A man engages in a form of sex with a woman (though out of sight of the camera). Carl seems to drop some double entendres during his painting shows.

We learn that a woman had an affair. A couple of vehicles move, apparently due to the lovemaking taking place inside. A fan of Carl’s shouts out of a car window, “You’ve been taking me to your special place since I was 9!” earning derisive looks from some pedestrians. An elderly couple holds hands.

Violent Content

A barn burns to the ground, and it’s said that a man died in the blaze. Some of Ambrosia’s pictures features disturbing imagery.

Crude or Profane Language

Profanity is relatively light in this PG-13 film: just one s-word, two uses of “d–n,” and one of “crap.” God’s name is also misused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Someone is given some medicinal marijuana—along with some similarly laced gummy bears in case the recipient needs another “pick-me-up.” The person uses them all in one evening.

Carl’s an avid pipe smoker. But when PBS announces that none of its programs can feature tobacco use, it eliminates PBS Burlington’s ability to use Carl Nargle reruns, since he smokes a pipe in every episode. (We see him frequently smoke both on and off camera.)

Characters drink wine. We hear references to past drug use. Carl tells someone that painting is the only high he needs.

Other Negative Elements

Jenna, Carl’s current young girlfriend, goes to a fondue restaurant with Carl, and he encourages her to try some of the cheese. She tells him that she’s been a vegan since she was 7 years old, but she wants to please him, so she tries it—and discovers that the cheese was covering a hunk of beef. Later that night, she vomits repeatedly (off camera).

Ambrosia alleges that Carl is sexist. He says that he actually treats women better than he treats himself, but Ambrosia suggests that he rarely sees women as actual people. And that, apparently, has worn thin. Katherine seems to confirm that their relationship was partly done in by Carl failing to truly see her.

Conclusion

When I was a kid, I watched my share of Bob Ross, who hosted The Joy of Painting on many a PBS station. Sometimes I’d catch his program between football games. Sometimes it’d be on late at night before a movie I wanted to watch. And while I watched with a certain irony in tow—his soothing patter, his pleasant-but-not-great paintings, his “happy little trees” was just so different—he was also just fun to watch. To create a beautiful, imagined landscape from nothing was curiously mesmerizing.

He was apparently Christian, too. And my memories of watching him were strong enough that, decades later, I wrote a Plugged In blog about him.

Carl Nargle is, alas, no Bob Ross. He’s not as innocent and not nearly as sincere. He’s a strange Casanova at the center of this very strange movie, lacking both the heart and conviction of the painter he was modeled after. He’s a bundle of insecurities barely hidden underneath his low, rippled voice, a man whose baser instincts master, for most of the movie, his higher inclinations.

Mainstream movie reviewers have not been thrilled with Paint, coating the critical canvas with poor reviews. It stands at 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes right now, and I’d imagine it’ll head lower.

But for all that, I have a feeling that the movie’s own strange charms may, like the original Bob Ross, grow on moviegoers with time.

This film gives us a shallow, likable painter to examine, and he stands at the center of a reasonably clean (although suggestive in spots) movie. Carl, like so many of us, seeks contentment in all the wrong places, his own fears and insecurities turning him into a baser version of who he could be.

But while he never finds God (whom we’d argue is the source of all true contentment and happiness), he does see a bit more clearly toward the end. Carl learns that he’d spent most of his life looking for fulfilment in facsimiles of joy while missing the real picture.

That realization serves as a reminder for us all, I think. We paint our lives in ways that please us. But God’s own art and design for us goes well beyond our man-made frames.