Although the movies naturally love painters, they
frequently tend to concentrate on the more familiar names and the more
flamboyant lives, which explains Charlton Heston painting the Sistine Chapel in
The Agony and the Ecstasy and Kirk
Douglas lopping off an ear in between painting sunflowers in Lust for Life.
In Girl With a Pearl Earring, based on a
pellucid and lyrical novel about the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes
Vermeer, on the other hand, the filmmakers deal with an important artist whose
relatively small production — 35 known works — and obscure personal history
seemingly provide scanty material for the usual art biopic. In part because of
the beauty and precision of the original book and its imaginative
reconstruction of some small incidents in Vermeer’s life, however, the movie
attains a rare level of illumination and significance.
The
actual protagonist of the film is a young woman named Griet (Scarlett
Johansson), sent by her impoverished parents to work as a maid for the Vermeer
family. The painter (Colin Firth), his wife Catharina (Essie Davis), and their
several children live with her imperious mother Maria Thins (Judy Parfitt), in
a large house in Delft.
Uncomfortable
as a Protestant in the Catholic household, overworked by the mistress, resented
by her fellow servant and the children, Griet suffers her bad treatment in
silence. Maria, however, orders her to clean the painter’s studio, where she
sees his work in progress and begins to learn about the making of art.
Most
of the film deals with Griet’s gradual understanding of the artist’s work and
the concomitant growth of her relationship with Vermeer himself. Recognizing a
sensitivity to composition, construction, and color in the young woman’s
comments on his pictures, the painter shows her some of his methods, the way he
develops his treatment of a subject, his use of the camera obscura.
He
ultimately teaches her about pigment, and trusts her to grind and mix his
various materials to achieve just the right colors for his paints. As she
evolves into something like an assistant, she inspires even more enmity in the
rest of the household and incites the anger of the jealous Catharina.
A
number of small personal stories revolve around the deceptively simple business
of Griet’s growing understanding of the master’s art. Increasingly the subject
of gossip in and out of the house, she attracts the crude advances of Vermeer’s
patron, the sensual, lubricious Van Rujven (Tom Wilkinson), as well as the love
of someone of her own social class, Pieter, the butcher’s son (Cillian Murphy).
The parallel developments signal her own sexual maturing. More important,
though it consists of little more than a touch or two, a few words, and some
glances, the real artistic and human relationship of the film involves Griet
and Vermeer.
Griet
becomes the inspiration and the model for one of Vermeer’s most famous
pictures, which shares its title with the movie. That painting provides the
deepest and most enduring expression of the unspoken, unconsummated passion
between master and maid. It also suggests the culmination of the slow, careful,
sometimes agonizing process of Vermeer’s creation. Just as the film explains
the context and meaning of the portrait, the motion picture in effect
illustrates the artist’s picture.
In a
sense, the movie serves as something of a lesson in art history, a speculative
interpretation of a lovely, apparently inscrutable work of art, of all the
thought and emotion that created Girl
With a Pearl Earring.
The
film displays some fine acting, especially in the admirable control of Scarlett
Johansson, who must maintain a docile passivity of expression and gesture while
reflecting a number of disparate emotions, just like the girl in the painting.
There is also control in the fierce intensity of Colin Firth, who speaks little
but implies a great depth and complexity of emotion. The whole cast, moreover,
displays the high degree of talent and skill that characterize most British
movies, at least the ones without Hugh Grant. It is a level of consistency that
is rare in far too many American films.
Its
greatest beauty, however, quite properly derives from its visual
accomplishments, for which the director of photography, Eduardo Serra, and the
production designer, Ben van Os, probably deserve the most credit. In the
exterior location shots and above all, the interiors, they replicate a number
of paintings by Vermeer and other Dutch masters.
Those
interiors, often lit by the sun from a single window, are starkly simple in
furnishing and decoration. In them, people assume the generally familiar and
commonplace attitudes and gestures of the artists’ usual subjects and are set
among the careful geometry of the compositions, sometimes framed through a
series of doorways. Every homely object glows with the incandescence of the
ordinary, a specificity both experiential and painterly. These shots constitute
the greatest beauty and the real triumph of the film.
Girl With a Pearl Earring is the best
movie about art since the stark and spiritual Babette’s Feast and the moving and baroque Tous les Matins du Monde. It isa convincing and beautiful instruction in the process and product of the
creative imagination.
Girl With a Pearl Earring, starring Scarlett
Johannsson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson, Judy Parfitt, Cillian Murphy, Essie
Davis, Joanna Scanlon, Alakina Mann, Geoff Bell, Chris McHallem, Gabrielle
Reidy; based on the novel by Tracy Chevalier; screenplay by Olivia Hetreed;
directed by Peter Webber. Little Theatres, Pittsford Cinema.
You can hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM
91.5 Fridays at 7:20 a.m., rerun on Saturdays at 8:50 a.m.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2004.
