Portrait of an art prodigy becomes a condemnation of the media

Four-year-old Marla Olmstead became an art-world sensation when her abstract paintings started selling for thousands of dollars and the media turned her into a personal interest story celebrity: the preschool Pollack. When a "60 Minutes" feature suggested she didn't paint them herself, or at least not without help, the public turned on the parents with such hostility that you'd think they had been convicted of some unspeakable crime.

"My Kid Could Paint That" isn't their story, or rather it isn't simply their story. It's a dissection of how the media found and fed and nurtured the story in their insatiable need for content to fill their news hours and talk shows, how it just as quickly turned on them and transformed the story from celebration to vilification, and how the public turned right along with them. Evidence has a very minor role in this media trial.

Director Amir Bar-lev investigates the boundaries between public and private that are blurred by the media's need for stories and as he confronts the motivations and responsibilities of the media he faces those same questions, sometimes right on screen.

Did Marla paint those canvases herself or didn't she? While the question hangs over the documentary and evidence is lined up on both sides, Bar-lev offers no definitive answer and, ultimately, it's beside the point.

Does the answer change the value of the paintings? Is it all about what's on the canvas or the notoriety behind it? Is his responsibility as a filmmaker to deliver a good story or an accurate story? What about his responsibility to the family?

Like the best of the new wave of American documentaries, it becomes about far more than the human-interest angle at the center of the story, yet Bar-lev never forgets about them. It only makes the provocative story all the more involving.