“Girl With a Pearl Earring” is as riveting as a tour of a good city museum. Depending on your inclination, you can take that either way you’d like.
An adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s historical novel, which concocted a back story to Johannes Vermeer’s painting of the same name, “Pearl,” in every one of its vividly colored frames, is an homage to the old master.
There are three acts in here somewhere, I think, but they’re not relayed through traditional means. Dialogue, for instance; there’s almost none of it here. With action frozen in carefully staged production designs, “Pearl” is more like an exhibition, hung in a gallery of celluloid.
Stare at it for 95 minutes; search for deeper commentary about class and privilege; appreciate its proportion and composition. If you’ve ever said of a movie that it was like watching paint dry, you will say it again of “Pearl” — and you may mean it as a compliment.
Set in 1665 Delft, Holland, “Pearl” imagines that the muse for the famous portrait was a 17-year-old common girl, Griet (Scarlett Johansson), introduced to the Vermeer household as a maidservant with an intuitive understanding of art that belies her illiteracy.
Miss Johansson, following her quietly intelligent role in “Lost in Translation,” takes quiet intelligence to even quieter heights here. Her face a ghostly pallor, she speaks pages of dialogue through facial tics and movement of mouth. Her Griet is timid, hesitant, curious, transfixed by the beauty of Vermeer’s work. Under a chaste white cap and buried in clothing, she nonetheless crackles with sexual energy.
Vermeer, played by the always likable Colin Firth, notices all these things, but the movie never quite says so. It doesn’t have to.
Peter Webber, a first-time feature director, telegraphs “Pearl’s” story arc through an economical interaction of imagery and sound: eye rolls toward footsteps overhead; the rumblings of arguments in other rooms; the moans of pregnancy. What all this does is establish the dysfunctional politics of the Vermeer household without spilling too much ink or wasting screen time.
Vermeer himself is a slow, deliberative worker, living well but painting essentially on hand-to-mouth commissions from a tyrannical patron, van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson).
He’s badgered by a materialistic, miserable wife, Catharina (Essie Davis), who’s indifferent to higher things and who uses her gift of fertility as leverage over her husband.
Cornelia (Alakina Mann) is a scampish daughter who becomes jealous of Griet’s newfound standing with her father. Watching over it all is a Machiavellian mother-in-law (Judy Parfitt) willing to endanger her daughter’s happiness to maintain cash flow.
Things reach a crisis point when van Ruijven, angling for control, commissions Vermeer to paint Griet alone, knowing full well the tension between them. Mercenary Maria (Miss Parfitt) slips Griet a few coins, a payment for her silence. Her daughter, the delicate thing, must never find out.
What’s the point of all these exercises, ultra-precious as they are? High art is wasted on the rich, is one thing that comes to mind. For van Ruijven, Vermeer’s paintings are tokens of privilege. For Vermeer, they are his passion. For his family they’re nothing more than the way he earns a living.
Mr. Webber, like director Stephen Daldry was in “The Hours,” is rather ham-handedly obsessed with food as allegory. Anyone who sells it or prepares it is by definition of low birth.
An ill-fitting and hurried story in “Pearl” follows Griet’s romance with a butcher’s apprentice (Cillian Murphy). Like Griet, he’s smarter and more refined than his job.
Talent, you may have noticed by now, is democratically distributed in “Girl With a Pearl Earring” — to the point that it almost forgets the decidedly uncommon genius of the man it so artfully celebrates.
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TITLE: “Girl With a Pearl Earring”
RATING: PG-13 (Sexual content)
CREDITS: Directed by Peter Webber. Produced by Andy Paterson and Anand Tucker. Written by Olivia Hetreed, based on Tracy Chevalier’s novel. Cinematography by Eduardo Serra. Production design by Ben Van Os. Music composed by Alexandre Desplat.
RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes.
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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