Owen Wilson gets all Vermont-y - and just a bit unhinged - in new movie 'Paint'

Carl Nargle is a star. As a Bob Ross-like painter on a Vermont public-television station, he makes viewers swoon with his soothing verbal and artistic tones while illustrating landscapes of what he calls “mighty Mount Mansfield.”

His fame extends outside the studios of the Burlington Public Broadcasting Center. “You inspire me to greatness!” an admirer shouts while the two men are stopped at a traffic light. Nargle converses with the fan via a loudspeaker mounted on the roof of his garishly airbrushed van.

Nargle’s head, it seems, is metaphorically as large as the perm that spirals above it. And if what goes up must come down, Nargle’s stratospheric Vermont-wide fame might just be on the verge of a complete collapse.

Owen Wilson stars as the artist on the brink in “Paint,” a film that comes out Friday. Merrill’s Roxy Cinema in Burlington is among theaters planning to screen the comedy starting April 7.

“Paint” is the creation of writer/director Brit McAdams. He grew up an hour north of New York City and lives in Los Angeles, but the state in which “Paint” is set holds a special place in his heart.

“I’ve spent a big chunk of my life in Vermont, so as a flatlander I do feel like I have at least an appreciation for Vermont,” McAdams said Monday from L.A. in a video chat with the Burlington Free Press. “It’s at the heart of the film. Vermont is as big a part of the film as anything else.”

Filming in New York (and Vermont)

McAdams said his family built a ski house at Killington when he was 12, and he has fond memories of joining his mother and sister as they painted and stained the home on their summer visits. His sister now lives in Rutland.

Though “Paint” is set in Vermont, the movie was filmed in 2021 just across the border in New York, in and around Saratoga Springs.

“I wish we could have shot in Burlington. It would have been amazing to shoot there,” McAdams said, adding that the tax incentives New York offers to filmmakers (and Vermont does not) sealed the deal. “We just couldn’t have done it.”

“Paint” does have scenes filmed in Vermont. McAdams said Corey Potter, who shoots drone footage at Killington Resort, did the same for “Paint.” Images pepper the film of Nargle’s landscape-art-adorned van, bearing Vermont license plates reading “PAINTR,” driving on roads toward Mount Mansfield.

‘Mount Mansfield at Night’

As “Paint” unfolds (in an advance screener viewed by the Free Press), Wilson’s character has a gift for visual art and for luring viewers with his soft philosophical aphorisms. (His signature line offers to take people “to a special place.”) Ratings at Burlington PBS are suffering, but Nargle’s immense popularity is helping to keep the small station afloat.

A station manager (played by Stephen Root) wants to capitalize on the artist’s renown by adding a second “Paint with Carl Nargle” show; Nargle balks, fearing that would water down his work. So instead, the station hires a young woman (Ciara Renee) to host a show following Nargle’s called “Paint by Ambrosia.”

As her fame rises – driven by art that’s edgier than her predecessor’s cozy mountain scenes - Nargle’s fame erodes. Suddenly, Nargle – whose hair, van and way of life reveal him to be an ossified version of that artist who achieved renown more than 20 years ago – begins to see he’s being passed by.

“Overlooking Mount Mansfield seems impossible because it’s the biggest thing in Vermont,” Nargle tells viewers. “But some people do, and they fall in love with Camel’s Hump, which is barely in the top four tallest mountains. Given the choice, I guess I’d rather be Mount Mansfield.” Nargle, too, wants to be at the top of Vermont, even as the entourage of women following him around the station dwindles.

Many of those women had been romantically involved with Nargle, including Katherine (Michaela Watkins), an assistant general manager at the station and Nargle’s one true love. The women begin to realize how he mistreated them over the years. Desperate to re-woo them, Nargle brandishes Green Mountain Coffee discount coupons as a peace offering.

He falls into a dark place, so dark that he paints a picture that’s nothing but black paint. He calls it “Mount Mansfield at Night.”

Informed by #metoo

McAdams said “Paint” is inspired in part by Bob Ross, the late permed painter who became famous on public television for creating “happy little trees.” “Paint” imagines a Ross-like life without so much happiness.

The film is also inspired by McAdams’ own life. The filmmaker, who’s 54, worked in his 20s at the music channel VH1 and met many of his musical heroes, some of whom disappointed him by not being such nice people, forever tainting his views of them.

Vermont was the ideal setting for “Paint,” McAdams said. “It’s incredibly bucolic and it’s a beautiful place. Carl Nargle paints beautiful things,” he said. Vermont also doesn’t change in a lot of ways, McAdams said, pointing to the law banning billboards and a general timelessness the state exudes.

“That can be beautiful and something you treasure about the state,” he said, while creating a setting that traps someone like Carl Nargle in the past. “It’s kind of the perfect state for it.”

Tragedies in his own life – namely the death of his mother when he was 27 – also informed the script, according to McAdams. He said Carl Nargle needed horrible things to happen in his life to work toward being a better person.

“There’s no way he would grow unless he got his teeth kicked in a little bit,” he said.

McAdams is best known as a director for comedian Daniel Tosh’s TV series “Tosh.0” in 2009. Since then he has mostly filmed commercials and developed various projects, including “Paint,” which he wrote in 2010. “Paint” received funding then, but the money fell through; McAdams was able to revive it a decade later.

In the meantime, he said, the script improved, with the #metoo movement shaping revisions. Carl Nargle’s artistic rival was a man in the original version, but by making that character a woman, McAdams said he was able to show Carl’s misogyny while elevating the female characters from people who watched his world to ones who changed it.

“It was just such an absolute gift that it didn’t get made when it got financed” in 2010, McAdams said. “It would not have been that movie if we had made it 13 years ago.”

McAdams is happy that the film is ready for release, if for no other reason than he no longer has to answer the question, “What’s going on with ‘Paint’?”

“It’s a much better question to answer these days,” he said.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Owen Wilson, in new film 'Paint,' plays a Bob Ross-like Vermont artist