‘Paint’ feels like a trailer in search of a movie, with Owen Wilson as a Bob Ross-type artist

Review by Brian Lowry, CNN

“Paint” can’t seem to decide what it wants to be, and ends up being nothing much at all, once you get past the visual of Owen Wilson under a Bob Ross hairdo. As so often happens, the net result is a fuzzy picture, and a coming-attraction trailer in search of a movie.

Wilson might look and sound like Ross, the PBS icon whose dirty laundry got a recent airing in a Netflix documentary, “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed,” but for these purposes call him Carl Nargle, a fixture at a Vermont public-TV station for the last 22 years.

Carl’s hushed, soothing whispers not only hypnotize audiences, but they’re near-irresistible to most of the women at the station, who seem eager to line up for a turn to visit his van. The exception would be his producer, Katherine (Michaela Watkins), although that stems from a history between them, as flashbacks eventually reveal.

When Carl rejects a pitch from the station manager, Tony (Stephen Root), to host a second hour, the station puts on a show just like Carl’s “Paint,” only with a younger artist named Ambrosia (Ciara Renée, who plays Hawkgirl in DC’s TV universe). Tony being one of those corporate types who can’t resist saying exactly what’s on his mind, he confesses that the hope is Ambrosia will become popular enough to render Carl obsolete.

Yet what could play like some cutthroat dark comedy, a Christopher Guest-like satire or merely a broadly silly lark never really settles on a tone. Part of that has to do with an inability to convey what really makes Carl tick beyond his yearning to be taken seriously, and the fact that he’s a middle-aged guy who doesn’t adjust well to change — whose career and fragile ego get threatened by a younger woman of color — feels decidedly underdeveloped.

Marking the feature debut for writer-director Brit McAdams, “Paint” most charitably works as an homage to Ross and the understated, comforting form of entertainment that he and other early public-TV staples represented, without really saying much about its inspiration beyond the surface trappings.

If movies start with their own version of a blank canvas, “Paint” splashes on a few pretty colors but, ultimately, proves about as exciting as watching you-know-what dry.

“Paint” premieres April 7 in US theaters. It’s rated PG-13.

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