Here's looking at you, "Kid"

In fact, "My Kid Could Paint That," which premiered at Sundance last winter and opens this week in New York and Los Angeles (along with the Olmsteads' hometown of Binghamton) before a wide national release, is barely about Marla at all. She haunts the picture like an adorable ghostie in OshKosh overalls, taking everything in with her sly, distracted expression and muttering things the grown-ups don't catch (or pretend not to). She is often described by journalists as being oblivious to her fame and the ensuing controversy, which, as any parent of small children can tell you, is a purely ridiculous notion. She even does a little painting in the film. But not much.

In February 2005, about six months after Bar-Lev had begun shooting his film, a bomb dropped on the Olmstead household. "60 Minutes II" ran a lengthy segment about Marla, hosted by Charlie Rose. The Olmsteads had allowed CBS producers and cameras extensive access to their home, and a hidden camera had been set up in the basement to capture Marla at work. But the painting she very slowly created beneath that camera, with whispered and specific exhortation from her father, was a splotchy and uneven color field that didn't look much like her other work.

"I saw her making very ordinary kinds of marks, no different from what a typical 3- or 4-year-old would make," psychologist Ellen Winner, who has worked with child prodigies, told Rose in the segment. Marla appeared to lack the drive, intensity and excitement seen in other advanced child artists, Winner said, adding that for a child to paint competent abstract works is virtually unknown. (At age 9, Pablo Picasso was still struggling to draw realistic figures.) She concluded: "I saw a normal, charming, adorable child, painting the way preschool children paint, except that she had a coach that kept her going."

It was high-minded journalistic betrayal at its finest. Charlie Rose had spent hours doing warm-and-fuzzy interviews with the Olmsteads, posed with them for family snapshots, and then gone on national TV to declare them perpetrators of a scam. It was sleazy, but the allegations it raised were not easy to dismiss, and have haunted Marla's public narrative ever since. The Olmsteads have repeatedly and categorically denied that Mark paints Marla's pictures or collaborates with her or even coaches her; his whispered urgings captured on tape are described as lapses in judgment, the product of anxiety. Bar-Lev knew them better than Rose did, and initially chose to believe them.

"Sometimes people see the film and say 'How could you not have been swayed by "60 Minutes"? How could you not have decided at that moment that they were lying?'" Bar-Lev says. "And the answer is that I asked myself, 'Why the fuck would these people have invited me into their home, and invited "60 Minutes" into their home, if there was some big secret they were hiding?'" This question is never answered, and is one of the principal reasons that the Olmstead conundrum, at least as presented in the film, is so difficult to plumb.

Besides, Bar-Lev reflected at the time, he already had footage of Marla painting. Didn't he? All you ever see in "My Kid Could Paint That," in fact, is either Marla pushing paint around on a completed canvas or working haphazardly on paintings she doesn't "finish," at least in her father's judgment. In one scene, Mark becomes visibly exasperated when Marla sloshes a lot of extra paint on a partially covered canvas and squishes it around with her hands. She clearly relishes the tactile and visual experience, but Mark dismisses the resulting brown glop as "mud."

"When that first happened, I totally thought, OK, my camera crew has interrupted this genius," Bar-Lev says. "She's 4 years old and she's only met us once before. It's a plausible explanation, and Mark led me to that conclusion. He said, 'You guys are killing me.'" (That's only one of Mark's ambiguous and possibly self-revealing comments in the film.) "After '60 Minutes,' when I revisited that material, I started to have questions about it, but they weren't conclusions. Ultimately, when I look at that scene, what strikes me most about it is its brutality. She's painting the way she wants to paint!

"To see Marla as he puts down her painting is -- he's saying, 'Most likely she'll go over it and make it nice.' Well, that is what she thinks is nice! That's why I wanted to put that at the end of the film. I wanted to remind people of the joy she felt in making that 'mud.' She's enjoying the hell out of herself, and at a certain point her father says, 'Oh, she's making a mess.' That, to me, is brutal."

To counter charges of fraud, the Olmsteads have produced and distributed a DVD of Marla painting a work called "Ocean." She appears to be a joyous, happy, creative child, basking in the loving attention of her parents and making a big, blotchy canvas covered with blobs of paint and decorated with teddy-bear heads (or possibly Mickey Mouse ears). She clearly created "Ocean" herself from start to finish, with encouragement and support from her audience, but very little coaching. It's a darn good painting for a little kid, but it exhibits almost none of the concentration or technical proficiency of the work that made her famous.

As Bar-Lev began to notice more and more peculiarities and inconsistencies about the Olmstead family and Marla's art, he found himself becoming the "confidence man" Janet Malcolm describes, slipping more and more into the territory of Charlie Rose-style journalistic deceit. In one scene, he turns the camera on himself to discuss his misgivings: He's begun to feel profound doubts that Marla is really the sole creator of her paintings, yet the Olmsteads still expect him to make a film that will exonerate them.

Next page: "When you become celebrities, you give up control of your story"