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| Girl with a Pearl Earring |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 95 m |
| Public Rating: 7.78 (69 votes) |
Director: Peter Webber |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Historical Drama |
Year: 2003 |
| Writer(s): Olivia Hetreed from the novel by Tracy Chevalier |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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The paintings of Johannes Vermeer are almost all concerned with the domestic. Cooking, servants, maids, and still lifes of dinners on plates, mostly in houses and mostly lit by the most mundane sources of light, such as windows and candles. “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the new film by Peter Webber based on the novel by Tracy Chevalier, gives us a fictionalized view of Vermeer that is completely domestic. He and his work are not influenced by politics, literature, war, great figures, or much in the way of religion, only by the intrigues, values, duties, and suspicious glances of his own household. We only see Vermeer (Colin Firth) outside his house once, and that is only as far as the doorstep. I think it no accident that it is while he is immersed in a conversation that makes him distinctly uncomfortable.
All this is seen through the eyes of a maid named Griet (Scarlett Johansson of “Lost in Translation”), who becomes an unwilling player in the internal struggles of the Vermeer family. Through her eyes we also see the cooking and cleaning that the master painted so much. As “Days of Heaven” practically teaches us how to run a farm, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is so attentive to getting the water from the canal, throwing out the slop bucket, and cleaning the clothes with a lump of grease, that we could almost learn from it how to run a 16th century Dutch home.
The look of “Girl with a Pearl Earring” will endear it to viewers as much as its story and characters. Those familiar with Vermeer’s paintings and those of the 17th century Dutch masters will notice that the movie has been carefully constructed to imitate their style. While I did not see any particular painting being acted out precisely, characters are positioned as if in paintings, so that their mere seating arrangement is suggestive. Windows let in shafts of light from beside characters, never behind them, because that’s how Vermeer painted them. The movie’s color palette is gloomy and grey when Griet, faced with poverty, first comes to work for the Vermeer’s. Even her skin is pale, blue, and corpse-like, and as we watch the canal freeze over and listen to a terrified and congested Griet breathing through her mouth, we realize that few movies have made us feel colder.
But as spring comes and things start to look up for her, oranges and pinks are introduced. The first appearance of the master’s blue paint is so startling, because it is a shade we have not before seen, and as he shows Griet how to mix one color after another, cinematographer Eduardo Serra (who shot Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable”) really gets to strut his stuff. The movie’s production designers have also outdone themselves, creating a Dutch city that is as cramped, gloomy, and sooty as it must have really been, and yet as beautiful as anything you might see in a museum.
The master and the maid, one of the movie’s characters points out, is the oldest story. When Griet arrives at the Vermeer house, there is a bit of a sizzle between her and the painter, however stifled. Things at the Vermeer house are already a bit, well, complicated. Vermeer himself appears vaguely emasculated compared to his mother-in-law (Judy Parfitt), who rules the house with an iron grip, demanding that he churn out paintings while his wife (Essie Davis) churns out babies, both at regular intervals. Man and wife are stilted, even hostile, and he isn’t exactly a great father, what with the dark gazes, long hair, and reluctance to speak. In Griet, who has some experience with her father’s tiles, he finds someone who can share his appreciation for the act of painting, for staring at the world and deconstructing which colors comprise different things.
But it all comes down to money. All this—the tiny, bitter world with all its intrigues—exists only at the will and pleasure of Vermeer’s patron, a local nobleman played by Tom Wilkinson (“In the Bedroom”). The constant production of paintings and babies may sound cruel to us, but at the time it made good financial sense. Griet’s entire existence is based around her teetering on the edge of homelessness. She must weave the most precarious of lines between Vermeer and his wife, not just because she is drawn to him, yet is also a moral person who resists, but also because she knows that displeasing either of them might cost her job. When the butcher boy (Cillian Murphy) approaches Griet and her family after church, her mother (Gabrielle Reidy) asks him “what do you do?” When he tells her, she remarks “that is a good trade,” and her parental interference between the two of them has ended. The boy, who is well-meaning if a little insolent, knows that a girl with few prospects had probably better marry, and he tries to make their courtship as painless as possible.
The mother-in-law oversees all these soap opera shenanigans with a Machiavellian eye, seeing more than she lets on. She is willing to tolerate whatever gets the paintings out on time to ensure money for the presence, as well as whatever gets the babies out on time to ensure the marriage and the money for the future that comes with hardworking offspring. That art is both an escape from his life’s woes and his greatest commodity surely stings Vermeer.
The film’s only major weakness is Vermeer’s patron, who doesn’t seem so much like a human being as a plot device for setting things in motion. That he hungers for Griet and that his power and wealth have made him accustomed to having his way with the lower classes is understandable. He seems to have turned the Vermeer household into his own little fishbowl, and toys with and tortures its members for his own pleasure, just to prove that he can. That he is so one-dimensionally villainous, without motivation, is jarring in a movie in which all the other major players are so developed and complex. It is he who mentions the predicament of the master and the maid to Vermeer and Griet, to their faces while he grins mischievously, and we’re never given any reason why he is so cruel.
Like one of Vermeer’s domestic paintings, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is a movie in which not very much seems to be happening, besides the cooking and the cleaning. But, in its subtle way, we learn about the struggle for power and dignity that Vermeer is waging against his patron and his mother-in-law, and we can see how Griet is struggling between her impulses to be loyal, loved, and yet not become a pawn. Like those same paintings, if we look closely, everything is happening.
Finished January 21st, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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 Printable Version
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Starring Colin Firth, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Wilkinson, Judy Parfitt, Cillian Murphy, Essie Davis, Gabrielle Reidy, and Joanna Scanlan
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