Carl Nargle (Owen Wilson) is an alternative-universe Bob Ross — a public-television art star with a gravity-defying perm and fans who fawn over every dab of burnt sienna, every splash of vermilion.
Nargle shoots his program, Paint With Carl Nargle, at the Burlington Public Broadcasting Center on a set that’s dressed to look like the inside of a cozy log cabin. In every episode he transforms the blank canvas on his easel into an idyllic landscape featuring the rugged and ubiquitous Mount Mansfield. He narrates the scene for at-home viewers, practically whispering pseudo-scientific ramblings about the life cycle of the forest, naming parts of the scene as they materialize in linseed and pigment: Miss Marcy the blackberry bush; Arthur the evergreen tree. But behind the scenes, the station is in trouble. And when the director asks Nargle to double the length of his episodes and create two paintings per show, the painter refuses, saying it would cheapen his art.
Nargle’s perm is the crown of his retro fashion sense, which also includes vintage shirts featuring floral and Southwestern designs and a sharp selection of maplewood-colored leather jackets. He smokes a big Oom Paul-style tobacco pipe and wears socks with his sandals. Nargle drives a custom van dubbed “Vantastic,” complete with a misty landscape paint job and a loud speaker connected to his CB radio — which he uses to whisper greetings to his fans. He’s a gentleman sexist who’s had affairs with multiple women who work on his show. He blasts the band Crow’s 1971 song “Don’t Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll” through open windows, and kids on bikes wave and shout from quiet sidewalks bathed in golden-hour light through an autumn prism of orange, red and yellow.
The movie is set in present-day Vermont, but the painter is stuck in the past. A journalist asks if he’s listened to a voice message on his cellphone, but Nargle still hasn’t “gotten the hang of using the answering machine inside of it.” Nargle is full of himself, but mostly too dim to be a jerk about it, and Wilson is perfectly cast. Paint will find an eager audience among fans of the actor’s knack for playing clueless but kindhearted bohemian types, from novelist Eli Cash (The Royal Tenenbaums) to fashion model Hansel McDonald (Zoolander).
When Nargle declines the offer to lengthen his episodes, the station hires a second painter. Ambrosia (Ciara Renée) is the Anti-Carl: a young woman of color with hip contemporary sensibilities and a wildly adventurous style that pits her blood-soaked UFOs against Nargle’s staid natural scenes of the venerable Mount Mansfield. Ambrosia shakes up the station and the viewers. She starts winning fans of her own and striking up a problematic and unbelievable — and unnecessary for the plot — romantic connection with the station’s assistant director, Nargle’s ex-girlfriend Katherine (SNL alum Michaela Watkins — Bitch Pleeze!).
The rivalry between Nargle and Ambrosia makes for a fun set piece at a portrait auction during a station fundraiser. There’s also a great turn from Denny Dillon (of HBO vintage classic series Dream On) as the auction host and a hilarious bit featuring a kid magician. Writer-director Brit McAdams sets one scene to the country funk of Jerry Reed’s “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” but in more thoughtful moments he adds musical moods courtesy of Dolly Parton, Steve Forbert, John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot.
Paint is laugh-out-loud funny throughout, but it’s also sweet and slow and kind of sad in that chilly-September-in-Vermont, everything-is-gorgeous-and-dying kind of way. Amid its laughs it’s a movie about moving: Nargle needs to learn and move on from the past if he — and his art — are going to have a place in the future; Katherine contemplates moving for a promotion at a station in Albany, N.Y.; Ambrosia is moving out of her young adult life, an artist and a woman still learning how to be both.
Paint is McAdams’ feature film debut, and it’s firmly on my early list of best movies of the year so far. It gives viewers happy blackberry bushes, deluded artists, regretful lovers, proud pines, big hair and the even bigger majesty of Mount Mansfield. It’s a movie that’s deftly balanced between laughable lines and lonely lives. Though it nearly tips into Adam McKay/Will Ferrell spoof territory, ultimately it stays rooted as a melancholy ensemble piece about misfits trying to take a second chance on themselves and each other.
