Review of My Kid Could Paint That (2007) by Chris Z — 05 Nov 2009

Nothing special here either from a filmmaking perspective, but this story is simply fascinating. IT's far more interesting as a kind of meta-commentary about documentary filmmaking itself, because the filmmaker kind of gets sucked into the film as a character himself in the middle of this story as it breaks down, and he is sort of confronted by his own role and his own opinions about what is happening and whether this is all a fraud or not.

It's fascinating too because the story changes as it falls apart, and the perspective of the director does too, though he tries to remain even-handed . But he breaks the plane by inserting his own commentary too as he unexpectedly discovers and gets sucked into this larger story of whether this story is fake or not.

In the end we are left judging for ourselves, but the closing images make it fairly apparent what the filmmaker thinks, and what most people will conclude. That being said, the whole OTHER fascinating story is really what one of the family friends says eventually about the entire fiasco, which is that this is really NOT at all a story of this 4-year old girl painting prodigy.

This movie is, in the end, not about her at all. It is truly a story about the adults all around her. She's just a girl who likes to paint. That's it. The rest is a story of adults, and it's both fascinating and sad, but very illuminating.

And of course there is yet the OTHER layer (soo many layers in this movie) about modern art. Scam or not, this story is a fascinating indictment of modern art and prestige. So either this girl is a genius painter.

Or even if it's all a fraud, her father is a genius artist playing a trick on the entire art and they fell for it brilliantly and much is exposed. Regardless, many things to think about in this story.

Fascinating!