Director: Amir Bar-Lev
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 2.5
Four-year-old Marla Olmstead receives international praise for her abstract impressionism-style "paintings," but her and her family get scrutinized by Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes II and people start to wonder if she's real or if Dad is somehow involved, and the high demand for her work drops off. Bar-Lev starts off on a unique track, using the girl as a springboard to investigate her relation to modern art, but gets a bit scared off by the big questions he raises (the disdain Americans feel towards art, the inability of the art world to create a plausible distinction between genius or fraud and even celebrating that act of fraud as genius, America's obsession with childhood and innocence and so on) and retreats somewhat, turning this into whether or not he believes the Olmsteads' story (that Marla is the sole artist behind the paintings) or not. This involvement is a questionable move - whatever happened to keeping your distance from a subject? (I blame Michael Moore indirectly for this trend, actually) - so his confrontation with the family at the very end, where he tells them he thinks they're lying, is quite ugly, though admittedly not as ugly as that kid's paintings. Honestly, I've never been much of a fan of Jackson Pollack or Willem de Kooning (I do love Rothko, but that's an essay in itself), but no one alive can ever convince me this girl is operating on the same level as them - all the people in this, including Bar-Lev, seem to forget that art requires - nay, demands - thought and experience, and Marla looks like she'd rather be doing somersaults than being forced by Dad (who, along with the gallery owner/friend, probably cooked this plot up) to make him money and fame.
