Here's looking at you, "Kid"

Is 4-year-old Marla Olmstead a painting prodigy or the instrument of a hoax? "My Kid Could Paint That" asks fascinating questions about art, family and journalistic ethics.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Documentaries

Photo: Sony Pictures

Marla Olmstead in "My Kid Could Paint That."

Oct. 6, 2007 | If journalists were forced to observe the commandment that doctors swear to follow -- first, do no harm -- it's not clear whether our profession would exist at all. Doctors do harm all the time, of course, because they are human beings who make mistakes and whose judgment and knowledge are imperfect. They may just be bad doctors. But even good journalists are likely to cause harm (albeit non-lethal harm, most of the time) to the people they cover, without a whisper of conscience and generally in service to high-minded abstractions like "the truth" or "the reader" or "the public's right to know."

As New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm, the patron saint of journalistic self-flagellation, has put it, what those noble phrases really boil down to -- and the impulse that journalism really serves -- is "society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness." In the most famous sentences of her career, and perhaps the most famous ever written about the craft, she declares: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to know what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Amir Bar-Lev did not have any of these dark thoughts in his head when he went to Binghamton, N.Y., about three years ago to meet Mark and Laura Olmstead and their 4-year-old daughter, Marla. He didn't know he would wind up making a movie, "My Kid Could Paint That," whose "primary inspiration," as he tells me over lunch, was Malcolm's bitter and brilliant investigative work "The Journalist and the Murderer," which begins with the sentences quoted above. He didn't know he would find himself on the horns of a painful ethical dilemma, torn between treating his subjects humanely and seeking the truth. He didn't know he was going to make an existentially tinged mystery story that would verge on self-regarding meta-documentary and that called attention to its own artifices and tricks, that would engage, as he says now, in "public hand-wringing" about its own morality. (Listen to a podcast of my interview with Bar-Lev here.)

He was a little-known documentary filmmaker in his early 30s who thought that the Olmsteads might make an interesting subject. Beginning in 2004, Marla had attracted global attention for her splashy, colorful abstract paintings, which had miscellaneously been compared to the work of modernist legends like Pollock, Miró, Klee and Kandinsky and had sold for first hundreds and then thousands of dollars.

In the most frequently told version of this junior expressionist's emergence, Mark Olmstead explained that he had plopped diaper-clad Marla on the kitchen table with some paint and paper when she was 2, mainly to get her out of his way. (He was an amateur painter himself.) She started splodging paint around with fingers, brushes, spatulas and other tools, and the rest was history. A friend of theirs hung some of Marla's pictures in his coffee shop, partly as a gag, and then they started to sell. Mark and Laura insisted they had done nothing beyond providing Marla with materials. She was the sole creator of the works and she decided when they were finished.

When Bar-Lev showed up, Marla had just had a solo show at the Binghamton gallery of dealer and artist Anthony Brunelli, an old friend of Mark Olmstead's, and TV crews and newspaper reporters from all over the world had shown up. Reasonably enough, the Olmsteads wondered why they should allow a filmmaker into their lives for months at a time when they already had more publicity than they could handle. As Bar-Lev recalls it, he told them, "Well, maybe my film will get a deeper truth than these news crews that just breezed in and out of here have missed, and maybe that truth is something that you'll be happy to have for your kids in the future." The Olmsteads said yes right away.

They had made a bargain with the devil, even if the devil didn't know it yet (and didn't even know he was the devil). Bar-Lev's "deeper truth" turned into something murky and unknowable, and his relationship with the Olmsteads culminated with a tense and painful three-hour standoff in their living room, which left everybody feeling crappy. As Laura Olmstead observes bitterly before stripping off her mike and leaving the room, the final confrontation of this fascinating and frustrating film is "documentary gold."

Bar-Lev thought his movie would be about an appealing American family thrust, partly by choice and partly by accident, into the eye of a media hurricane. It might also be about the widespread public incomprehension of and hostility toward modernist art. As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman discusses in the film, Marla's story appealed to two contradictory popular prejudices. First of these is the idea of prodigal artistic talent as a lottery prize handed out to random toddlers by God. Second is the notion that modern art (at least in its abstract or nonfigurative guises) is a pseudo-intellectual con game that has no standards and conveys no meaning, so the apparent success of a 4-year-old debunks the whole enterprise.

Bar-Lev even thought his movie might be about Marla Olmstead, a strikingly beautiful, standoffish child who seemed to possess an unusual talent. Skipping over the comparisons to various dead European males whose work mystifies the museum-going public on several continents, Marla's big and colorful canvases suggested the verve and openness of childhood, alongside a singularity of purpose and an attention to compositional detail almost unimaginable in someone her age.

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