Girl With a Pearl Earring

Girl With a Pearl Earring

The year is 1665, and the period reconstruction is formidably detailed.
2003 - UK - Drama
Reviewed by Elvis Mitchell





Type:
Features
Distributor:
Lions Gate Films
Starring Colin Firth, Judy Parfitt, Tom Wilkinson, Scarlett Johansson, Cillian Murphy. Directed by Peter Webber. (PG13, 99 minutes). At the very start of this film, Griet (Scarlett Johansson) is shown peeling an onion — a metaphor as image that isn't often seen outside first-semester filmmaking classes. The determination visible in such an effort communicates Importance Writ Large. The film, adapted by Olivia Hetreed from Tracy Chevalier's novel, does have a great subject; creating a story around a work of art shrouded in mystery, and dealing with a project that both ruins a woman's reputation and ensures her a place in history. In "Earring," the story offered is Griet's, a scullery maid who became the muse of Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) and the subject of the painting of the same name. Ms. Johansson is photographed so that her skin is as opalescent as her earring, but the movie is opaque. It's an earnest, obvious melodrama with no soul, filled with the longing silences that come after a sigh. — Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times
A slow, attentive movie about a painter and his model demands the kind of patience that moviegoers, especially in this hectic season, may feel reluctant to supply. But Peter Webber's reworking of Tracy Chevalier's novel is worth staying with: it casts a heavy spell as it unfolds the tale of Griet (Scarlett Johansson), a maid newly arrived in the house of Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth). The year is 1665, and the period reconstruction, for those who are aroused by such things, is—apart from a few modern lines of dialogue—formidably detailed. The danger with such beautifying efforts is that cinema will turn into a branch of taxidermy, and what keeps Webber's movie alive is the tenseness of the setup (will this girl stay in the artist's household, and, if so, will she become his lover or his muse?), and, above all, the presence of Johansson. She is often wordless and close to plain onscreen, but wait for the ardor with which she can summon a closeup and bloom under its gaze; this is her film, not Vermeer's, all the way.—