Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
Toast of the town, subject of a documentary and suspected fraud -- all before first grade. When the time comes, it should make rich fodder for Marla Olmstead's college application.
Little Marla, now 7, is the girl from Binghamton, N.Y., who was compared to Kandinsky and Pollock. Buy a Marla now and it might be like owning a Warhol in another 20 or 30 years.
At least that was the word about the 4-year-old who sold more than $300,000 in paintings, until Charlie Rose wondered about the authenticity of her work on "60 Minutes II." That same question haunts the documentary "My Kid Could Paint That," arriving Friday at the Regent Square Theater.
The media celebration of Marla already had started when director Amir Bar-Lev asked parents Mark and Laura Olmstead about documenting their daughter's trajectory to superstar. They agreed and welcomed him into their lives as a friend.
He seemed to shoot much of the movie as that, rather than a journalist or objective filmmaker, until correspondent Rose of "60 Minutes II" cast a pall over the almost-too-good-to-be-true story. He suggested an adult may have done some or all of the work on the canvases credited to Marla.
Bar-Lev hears that accusation at the same time as the Olmsteads, who were gathered in their living room watching CBS with a Binghamton newspaper reporter. She had been the first to write about Marla, although a subsequent New York Times piece kicked the story into overdrive.
From that moment, the tenor of Bar-Lev's filmmaking shifts, as does our perception of the family and the paintings. Like abstract art itself, the authenticity of the paintings is subject to interpretation, but there's no doubt that CBS changed everything.
"My Kid" has a dynamite topic and a less than dynamite documentary maker who frankly was compromised by his approach. It allowed him to capture Marla and her younger brother (and the parents) in unguarded moments, and yet it clouded his objectivity.
However imperfect, "My Kid" is many things: a window into the rise and fall of a media sensation, a look inside a family thrust into the limelight, a cautionary tale about the seduction of success and acclaim, and a reminder about keeping your emotional distance from a story.
Even if you can't tell a Pollock from a Picasso, this "Kid" is worth meeting.
