Pint-sized Picasso

When a child’s paintings move from the refrigerator door to gallery walls, the art world takes notice. In his documentary “My Kid Could Paint That,” director Amir Bar-Lev follows the rising celebrity of 4-year-old painting sensation Marla Olmstead and the fall of her reputation once the media cried fraud.

Shots of Marla painting in her underwear on the dining room table look like any proud parent’s home videos. But Marla’s messes sell for as much as $300,000 at dimly-lit, posh galleries where the little girl totters around in her denim overalls. Interviews with Marla’s parents illuminate the thin line between hype and childhood exploitation.

Bar-Lev can’t make up his own mind about the direction of this film and straddles the line between support and doubt of Marla’s talent. He presents evidence that she works alone, as well as the argument that her father polishes the pieces – an argument he resists after spending intimate time with the family and child. This film, like a piece of artwork, is open to interpretation. There are no answers to the questions raised, which is both frustrating and fitting for a film that deals with abstract art.

“My Child Could Paint That” requires undivided attention and conversation afterward. It is a story about stories — about critics, the art world, pressure and parenting all swirled by one child’s brush strokes.

The DVD extras include deleted interviews with locals in the town of Binghamton, N.Y., the small town shocked by its own little celebrity. These colloquial interviews balance out the haughty art jargon found throughout the film. An example of this jargon is the extra interview of Michael Kimmelman, an art critic who captures the problem of Marla by explaining that everyone interprets truth differently, but that the importance of art is how it lingers in the mind.

Images of Marla’s paint-splattered little fingers and sun-shiny murals linger, but her story could be just another fairy tale in a grown-up world.