BLOGGING SUNDANCE: The Painted Sale

The entries at Sundance this year have been so unequivocally dark and upsetting that even a lively documentary about a child artist can't escape unscathed. My Kid Could Paint That, Amir Bar-Lev's account of four year old Marla Olmstead's rise to prominence as a famous and high-priced abstract painter, plays against its seemingly light subject matter to create an unsettling drama. The movie sold to Sony for $1.85 million, a larger sum than anything collectors plunked down for one of Olmstead's creations—but not by much, relatively speaking.

What begins as a sweet story of unlikely success eventually ventures into expose and questions of exploitation. Bar-Lev begins the movie by observing Olmstead's parents, an intriguing couple who seem divided over their daughter's success. Marla's father, a painter himself, remains comfortable with the media exposure, while her mother experiences more trepidation. The mood of the story grows more mysterious after a probing 60 Minutes episode suggests that Marla's father has polished her creations to give them their mature appearance.

Wanting to feel optimistic about the family's intentions but uncomfortable with the possible immorality taking place behind the scenes, Bar-Lev makes the right decision by incorporating himself into the documentary. He's not in every scene, but his intentions with the movie become suspect, as he admits, once it becomes unclear just how much Olmstead has painted by herself (nobody seems to be able to capture her genuine creative work on tape). In some ways, Kid plays as a companion piece to last year's Who the Bleep is Jackson Pollock?, which was about a trucker who navigates the snobbery of the art world trying to sell a supposedly original Pollock work. I'm also reminded of the serialized Jules Feiffer comic about a young opera singer whose parents force him to perform, until he escapes to the streets and has a lot more fun being a regular young boy. Marla's parents don't seem antagonistic, but like everything in the creative community, surface appearances can be misleading. An arts editor for the New York Times explains that Marla is "an innocent," and that's what makes her work popular. "Nobody is saying 'fuck you' in this painting," he says. Unless, of course, they are.