First off, who was the moron in the Lions Gate marketing department who couldn't come up with a better tagline than: The Best-Selling Novel Comes Magically to Life!

That's the kind of thing that you really should wait for some hack critic like Earl Dittman to say for you (exclamation points included).

Fortunately, having never read Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel, I am unlikely to declare that in this instance it has been brought to life, magically or otherwise.

Actually, I have been assured that there are many differences between the novel The Girl With a Pearl Earring and the feature The Girl With a Pearl Earring and the vague inklings I've heard about the differences (both from glancing over reviews and from the friend who saw the movie with me and who has read the book) kinda disturb me a tiny bit. The flaws I found with the film can be explained with backstory from the book, apparently. On the other hand, it sounds as if the film's central agency, its power relationships, have been shifted in dramatic directions.

But I know nothing about that and therefore will waste no time on discussing it. Fine reviews already posted by thevoid99 and Penguinlady come equipped with knowledge of the book.

I can only approach the film, which is, in its painterly way, a small and special movie. It's an artful and intellectual character study being released in a season where awards voters and critics are often looking for greater scale and grander themes, rather than satisfying executions of difficult tasks.

The Girl With a Pearl Earring is a movie about observation, a film about the gaze and about the desire it brings. It's about the interplay between an artist and his subject and a metatextual musing on beauty and artistry and the ways that aesthetic wonder can be conveyed. Those are all fairly nebulous topics for a time of the year when everything has to be about Love or Death or Living or War or Cats in The Hat.

The Girl With a Pearl Earring begins in Delft, Holland in the 1650s. Griet (Scarlett Johansson, who will be gushed about later) is the young daughter of a tilemaker (or some sort of artisan), forced to go work as a maid, apparently after a kiln accident burnt her father. Griet, who we immediately know has an artistic temperament (she makes the arrangement of a crudites platter into a pinwheel of color), could hardly be more perfectly placed. She is to be a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth).

While later celebrity artists like Picasso would do cheep sketches to cover their bar tabs (whether this is a true story of merely apocryphal, I don't know), Vermeer is an over-deliberate artist, taking months and years on his creations. This irks his mother-in-law Maria (Judy Parfitt), a harsh, but pragmatic woman who seemingly acts as his agent. It also bemuses his leading patron Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), a wealthy man who fancies himself an art critic. Vermeer's wife Catharina (Essie Davis) is too busy having children to be bothered by her husband's pace.

Griet enters the house and is mostly set to work in the laundry room, but she's also given the long-neglected chore of cleaning Vermeer's studio. As an outside romance blooms with a humble and elfin butcher's son Pieter (Cillian Murphy), Griet becomes increasingly fascinated with the world of Vermeer's art and the painter and his patron become increasingly fascinated with Griet.

First it's just Vermeer asking Griet to check out his camera obscura (if you know what I mean). Then they're spending quality time grinding new paint (if you know what I mean). Then she's posing for him and becoming a famous painting that hangs in The Hague (if you know what I mean).

Yep, The Girl With a Pearl Earring is one of those movies where you look on the back cover of the video box and you see somebody describe it as "erotic" and you're all "Woo-Hoo! Hot 17th century Dutch Sex! You don't have to take your clogs off (to have a good time)." Then you get the movie home and you watch it and there's virtually no sex, no nudity and things don't get any more exposed than when one character lets down her flowing blond hair. That seems like a let-down when you're looking for Basic Instinct.

And yet, The Girl With a Pearl Earring is so clearly and ravishingly erotic that I can't avoid using the term. So much of the film is about tactile responses. It's about the moist layers of a chopped onion, about rubbing your finger over a dusty table, about caressing the ambers and oils that are combined to make beautifully colored paints. Thus, although conventions of society prevent Griet and Vermeer from getting hot and heavily in his studio, covered in paint (like in some period Kari Wuhrer erotic thriller), there's nothing in the books that says they can't stare at each other from across rooms.

So boy oh boy is there a lot of staring at each other from across rooms and hidden (half in darkness, half in light) from across rooms. There are also quite a few shots of their hands ever-so-nearly coming together. And if they're actually near each other? Oye vey, but the tension is unbearable. The Girl With a Pearl Earring is an awfully cool movie (the actors always look as if they're freezing their toes off), but it's also awful hot.

The erotic tone is fitting because the ultimate painting of the same name is, as one character describes it, "obscene." Compare it to Vermeer's other depictions of female subjects (which wouldn't take too long, given that the dude only has 36 masterworks to shift through) and you can see a marked difference between his treatment of that anonymous pearled girl and, say the "Portrait of a Young Woman" which hangs at the Met in New York. For centuries, it was just generally accepted that the subject of the "Girl with a Pearl" was Vermeer's daughter Maria, but if that's the case, the painter seems to have had some impure thoughts going on. It's not so much the not-so-innocent cast of the eyes, as the subject's slight open mouth and her full and glistening lips. There's an engagement between artist and subject in this painting which is quite striking even if you don't know a thing about this film or Chevalier's book. That Girl with a Pearl's got it going on.

Johansson only looks a little like the actual paining, but she certainly has the right key features. Instead of wasting time with the bland "book comes magically to life" tagline, they should have just said "See Scarlett Johansson's lips, five stories high. With her intensely dark eyes (as if no light could escape from them, save a twinkle) and her pillowy lips (the scene where Vermeer asks her to lick her lips three times is the film's most erotic), Johansson is the essence of the Girl with a Pearl, even if she isn't a full impersonation.

Lest one think I'm merely gushing over her beauty, it must be noted that Johansson's abilities as an actress should never be in doubt. As I'm sure I discussed in my Lost in Translation review, Johansson is her generation's most subtle actress and I may expand that set to encompass several other generations as well. She does so very much with so very little. Unlike a lovely manque like Kiera Knighley, whose huge eyes yield only cuteness, but nary a sign of wisdom or thought, Johansson conveys love, concern and concentration using only her eyes. Sometimes the rest of her face doesn't seem to be working at all, which I find amazing. The actress also has a fantastic smile, which has been neutralized by her somber part here, but she finds a way to work around it. With a slight, but hardly overbearing, British accent, Johansson also negates her somewhat flat voice, which may be her greatest acting liability. Mostly, she just vanishes into the character.

I kinda wish I could say the same about Colin Firth's Vermeer, who has been somewhat reduced to Vermeer-as-Darcy (in reference to Firth's adored performance in the Pride and Prejudice miniseries). Firth interprets Vermeer as intense and brooding and little else. Perhaps he is just playing the part as enigmatic. It's never made clear, for example, if he is lusting after Griet or lusting after the thought of painting her. Firth doesn't make a distinction, which makes that aspect of the film either vague or mysterious depending on your level of generosity. Whatever the case, Firth's turn here is one-note and yet I bought the one note fully, so I guess I'm not criticizing so much as just sayin'.

Come to think of it, The Girl With a Pearl Earring is kinda just a remake of Lost in Translation. A young waif (played by Johansson) becomes the platonic muse to a middle-aged artist having trouble with his wife, kids and career. I'm not sure how much of a career Johansson can make playing only enablers of older men, but I guess you've gotta have a niche.

The supporting cast is fine, if only occasionally notable. From the moment he arrives on screen, Wilkinson is too obviously the evil dandy. While he may have a good eye for fine art, there's never a question that before things end, he's going to do something singularly unpleasant. Wilkinson is a good enough actor that he's always interesting to watch even when there's very little depth for him to provide. More interesting is Parfitt's work as the tightly-corseted mother-in-law. I never understood her motivations for a second, but she's a commanding presence. Davis, who I just saw in London two weeks ago in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers is set up as the film's conduit for external emotion and if shrieking and wailing are going to occur, she's gonna be the one to do it. Looking like either a pretty Dutch girl or an Elf, Murphy ("28 Days Later") has no real part and is mostly there for story structure.

Screenwriter Olivia Hetreed doesn't so much solve Chevalier's book as she streamlines it in obvious (and somewhat conventional) cinematic ways. The film's obvious back and forth structures alternate between the Griet-Vermeer scenes and the interludes with Pieter, which hint at Griet's escape, and Griet's awkward rivalry with Vermeer's daughter Cornelia (Alakina Mann). I've been told that in the book it's made clear that Cornelia is an aspiring artist herself and views Griet as a rival. In the film, Cornelia is just a spoiled little twit and she spends much too much time lurking in corners to be believable as a real character or to be a valuable asset to the plot. Occasionally, though, Cornelia proves a catalyst for tensions, but it's hardly worth mentioning.

Johansson and slight Firth aside, the success of The Girl With a Pearl Earring is a tribute to first-time feature director Peter Webber and cinematographer Eduardo Serra. I've already discussed Webber's success at creating intimacy and eroticism, but he also deserves co-credit for the film's masterful visual sensibility. The film is shot in the color palette and lighting style of the work of the Dutch masters, an experiment which could have looked artificial and contrived, but come off totally.

In my recent review of Last Samurai, I praised John Toll's photography, but made a contrast between cinematography that is beautiful and cinematography that is Art. Beautiful cinematography is easier to understand, which is part of why Toll is likely to earn an Oscar nomination while it is more-than-likely that Serra will miss out for his vastly more impressive work on The Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Essays could be written on the film's lighting alone. The interplay of light and shadows is achieved through extensive use of natural and available light. Vermeer's house is, not surprisingly, without electricity, so it is full of dark hallways and corners and in the moments when characters pass through those shadows, their faces often disappear, but even if the details are obscured, there's almost always a light source somewhere just outside of the frame to catch outlines and silhouettes. The sometimes-unseen lights produce a great depth-of-field in nearly every shot, a representation of space which is echoed in Vermeer's paintings (or, to get the chronology correct, echo the use of space in Vermeer's work). Many scenes are shot only in candlelight, where Serra picks up the reflections in the characters' eyes, with Johansson's orbs the leading reflective surface. Such care has been given to every shot to determine the direction of the light and the way that sun or candlelight interplay with different objects and, more importantly, different colors.

In certain scenes, the colors are strangely muted, but in others, the colors are otherworldly. There are two scenes of Pieter and Griet walking outside along the canals where the yellows and blues of the countryside took my breath away. In other scenes, the characters seem to be sitting for portraits, with the colors and light and shadows playing on a variety of planes.

The Girl With a Pearl Earring is a film that deserves to be seen on a big screen if only to allow for the full appreciation of the trick that Webber and Serra pull off. Production and art designers Ben van Os and Christina Schaffer deserve notice for assisting in the illusion.

At only 95 minutes, The Girl With a Pearl Earring is a short film, but I'm not sure if it could have sustained my interest for much longer. The pace is slow and lengthy periods of silence predominate (eased by Alexander Desplay's score). I'm not sure that I learned anything of note about Vermeer or his creative process and I wasn't really left with any interest in going back and reading Chevalier's book.

I was, however, sucked completely into the film's dark little work and became, if only for the length of the film, involved in the tensions between the characters. The Girl With a Pearl Earring earns a solid 4 stars out of 5 recommendation from me.



Recommended:
Yes