Flak Magazine: Review of Girl With a Pearl Earring, 01.20.04

Girl with a Pearl Earring opens with a close-up of a peasant girl, Griet (Scarlett Johansson), cutting vegetables and then arranging them with casual art. The scene is deliberately evocative of Dutch masters' still lives, which were originally meditations on the vanitas of sensual delights — reminders that these perishable fruits, oysters, flowers were destined for quick corruption — with a clear moral subtext: Contemplate instead eternal punishment or reward. But the Dutch painters soon lost themselves in formalities of composition and techniques of illusion, and the viewer was more ravished than mortified by the product.

In Girl, however, the opening still life still signals grievous change. Griet's mother dryly tells her daughter, "Stop that," and leads her upstairs. There, Griet's blind, maimed father gives her a ceramic tile he had painted with a simple religious scene: a man, a woman and a serpent. It's an ominous going-away present; Griet is being pressed into service as a maid in the household of Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth). The mother's parting words are likewise a warning: Griet should stop her ears against the Vermeers' Catholic prayers. In this way we learn that Griet is a Calvinist, too modest to even show her hair, going uneasily to a society where sensuality is not repudiated.

One of the chief virtues of this very simple film is that much of its exposition is delivered elliptically like this. Many of the story's salient realities are primarily suggested with casual asides or visual cues; hardly anything is explained (the line count must be a near-record low). Director Peter Webber and writer Olivia Hetreed, who adapted the Tracy Chevalier novel, both spent years as film editors, so it's both unsurprising and totally appropriate that the story is told so visually.

Equally smart is casting Johansson and surrounding her with veterans of the British stage. This allows them to do something finer than the bodice-ripper promised by promo-photograph: Firth making to kiss Johansson over the tag line, "Beauty inspires obsession." The suggested Vermeer/Griet romance is hardly the central story. Nor is the production of the eponymous "masterpiece" — Vermeer's portrait of Griet — for the painting is a small one that is not produced in defiance of long odds, sneering philistines or an impatient pope. Instead, we get an imaginative but surprisingly pure deconstruction of the famous portrait, an extended whydunnit about how it came to be and the context and means by which the artist produced his effect.

Following Griet into the Vermeer household lets us learn about her in that context, and about the household in the larger context of the time. Griet is quiet, dutiful and frightened of losing her place. She has to be, for although the wealth of the world is pouring into Holland through its pre-eminent fleets, life there is still cold, cramped and very precarious. (Even Rembrandt, though famed throughout Europe as "the wonder of the age," died poor). When Griet joins the household, Vermeer is relatively prosperous, an esteemed painter with a rich patron, a nicely furnished house and a beautiful, high-strung wife. But the housekeeper gossips to the new maid about the occasional pawning of the wife's jewels. (In Holland as in Hollywood, apparently you were only as good as your last picture.) So, while Vermeer loses himself in his work and the sensual life that seems to feed it, the operation is closely run by Vermeer's steely and practical mother-in-law, who handles all the money and butters up the patron, Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson).

For a time, Griet and the housekeeper Tanneke have a distinctly "downstairs" perspective on various domestic dramas: Vermeer's search for saleable subjects, his wife's exile from his studio, their struggles to make the money stretch. In the line of duty, Griet befriends the local butcher boy who pursues her. She seems likely to marry and drift into the servant underclass. But when she attracts Vermeer's notice and inspires a picture, her curiosity about and awareness of the process inspires a growing friendship. The wizard begins to share his secrets; he shows Griet how to mix paints, how he builds illusions with undercoats and overtones, and how he discovers light's mysteries with the camera obscura. Soon she has moved from the cellar to the attic above the studio, and you can almost see the Freudian transference of affections from her China-painting father.

Griet also attracts the eye of Van Ruijven, played by the wonderful Wilkinson as a complex monster: brilliant but rapaciously cynical. When Vermeer unveils a portrait at a supper, the worldly Van Ruijen laughs, knowing just how his hire has gotten the golden light on the subject: "So, essentially you've shellacked my wife in piss." The painter can only mutter, "It's the right color." Similarly, Van Ruijven sniffs out the growing intimacy between Vermeer and Griet and propositions her in the crudest terms. Forewarned by Tanneke that the patron has seduced and ruined one of Vermeer's models already, Griet escapes, but as Vermeer's needs grow more desperate as his family grows, it becomes unclear how the painter will protect his servant from his patron, especially when Van Ruivjen commissions his own portrait of Griet. These questions provide the suspense in the story: Will the master bed the maid, or will the wealthy pig add her, body and image, to his collection? At one point a literal showdown between Griet's two admirers seems imminent, but we are spared this cliché. We instead get compromises, betrayals and bloodlettings that are both more subtle and pleasingly plausible. Vermeer decides the commissioned portrait needs one artificial touch in the form of the pearl earring — purity, in the iconography of the medium; sinful ostentation, to Griet; and something very different to Vermeer's wife, whose pearls are secretly pressed into service. It's a genius touch. The tear-shaped pearl finally focuses the portrait, and the film as well.

This wholly satisfying film is made up of a lot of little touches, many of which are imparted through the rising star Johansson. So far she's been quite smart in selecting roles (Ghost World, Lost in Translation) which demand her forte: stillness projecting a downbeat sensitivity. She's blessed with a sort of photogenic authenticity, like a gene-splice of Molly Ringwald and Liv Ullman. She's arrestingly beautiful, but doesn't need a latex nose or prosthetic teeth to look like a real person. That's why her production still is probably destined to eclipse Vermeer's painting in most people's memories of Girl with a Pearl Earring. In the film she does stretch a little; she actually has to come up with a bit of an accent, to mesh with her British supporters, and she gets brief furloughs from catatonia when Griet shows a little fire. It's enough to make one wonder what she'll be like when she's not playing just the older guy's object of desire. In the meantime, she's done very well setting herself at the center of this project, which is gorgeous in almost every scene, and has so few moving parts that nothing can go very wrong.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)