Amir Bar-Lev made a documentary called My Kid Could Paint That, about a four-year-old in Binghamton, N.Y. who is supposedly an art prodigy. Bar-Lev set out to make a film supporting the kid, Marla Olmstead, and her family -- who has been accused of helping her.

But he came to believe that Marla might not be the prodigy she was being made out to be. And when his film came out, the Olmsteads -- who came to think of Bar-Lev as their friend -- felt terribly wounded by the choices he had made.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Back in 2004, Mr. Bar-Lev, a filmmaker who directed the documentary “Fighter,” an intimate, hilarious portrait of two Holocaust survivors, read a commentary about Marla by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for The New York Times, and thought it would serve as the basis for a good film about the subjectivity of expression in the context of modern art. (Mr. Kimmelman also appears in the film.)

The documentary gradually became a meditation on truth instead, one that manages to explore and sometimes indict the motives of all the adults who have swirled around Marla: her parents, gallery owners, reporters and, eventually, the filmmaker.

Mr. Olmstead and his wife, Laura, a dental hygienist and a mother of two, are not simple country folk. They are bright, articulate people, but were unprepared for the firestorm of coverage that engulfed them after outside attempts to film Marla painting something from start to finish proved difficult. (The family believes that the process of filming prevents Marla, who is shy, from focusing.) Over the film, Mr. Bar-Lev begins to have misgivings and finds his role as family familiar and advocate morphing into something darker. The movie is a transparent rendering of the journalistic process, and the picture is none too pretty.

“This is a film about adults; it is not about a little girl painting in her house,” Mr. Bar-Lev said, sitting in the cafe at the Yarrow Hotel in Park City last week. “In the end, I had to choose between my affection for the family and my concern for the truth of the storytelling.”

“I had to try and figure out if they were lying to me,” he said, recalling the months he spent in intimate quarters of their home. “In order to do that, I kind of had to lie to them, to not be straightforward about my misgivings. I told myself that it was O.K. because I truly held out hope until past the end that they were not lying and that the allegations were completely unfounded.”

It can be brutal to watch. In a talk with Ms. Olmstead, Mr. Bar-Lev reveals that he has doubts about the agency of Marla’s work — his effort to film her working have produced paintings that don’t resemble the other finished work. Ms. Olmstead stares directly into the camera.

“I need you to believe me,” she says.

He does and he doesn’t. Mr. Bar-Lev has his share of misgivings, but does not make a conclusion in the film about what exactly happened when Marla painted.

“Amir did not set out to use the family in the course of making his film,” said Elizabeth Cohen, a reporter for the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin, who figures prominently in the documentary. “The film makes us confront the realities of the media process, the predatory aspects of journalism, filmmaking and storytelling. There is a constant need to feed a 24-hour news cycle, but what about the people we write about? What happens to them?”

If you didn't pick up on it, my headline for this post is a nod to the title of the infamous Janet Malcom book The Journalist and The Murderer.

Her slim volume on the relationship between one-time Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of murdering his family, and one-time celebrity non-fiction author Joe McGinniss -- and what it says about journalism in general -- opened with this lacerating sentence:

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

"He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

"Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson.

"Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about "freedom of speech" and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about making a living."

I haven't read the book in a while, but McGinniss started out thinking MacDonald was innocent, but then came to believe otherwise. However, he didn't let MacDonald in on this salient fact. When his research was winding down, McGinniss did become progressively less pal-sy with MacDonald.

And when the book came out, he portrayed MacDonald as a lying, monstrous psychopath. A furious MacDonald sued for fraud and breach of trust. He came within one juror of winning.

Now, in defence of Bar-Lev, to whom does he owe the greater duty: The Olmsteads or his audience, which is relying on him to produce a work of non-fiction?

If he thinks he is being manipulated by them, what should he do?

I was asked to give a talk to a university class once upon a time. "Do people ever try to manipulate you?" one student asked.

"Every day," I replied, looking straight at them.

What I should have added: "Maybe I'm trying to manipulate you by saying that."

While I don't think journalists should behave like con men, nor do I think they should be credulous suckers either.

To avoid feeling covered in slime, however, perhaps journalists and documentarians should be clear to their subjects from the beginning that their first allegiance is to what they see as the truth. And if the truth hurts, so be it.