Thursday, January 29, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: The eyes have it

Girl with a Pearl Earring is as gorgeous and enigmatic as Vermeer's painting

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Not much is known of Johannes Vermeer, the hermetic 17th century Dutch painter whose meager output--like that of his countryman, Vincent Van Gogh--would be more celebrated posthumously than when he was alive. Yet one of his portraits, "Girl with a Pearl Earring," is rivaled only by the "Mona Lisa" in its air of mystery and allure and its ability to provoke passionate curiosity.

With his first theatrical feature, documentarian Peter Webber uses that mystery as his driving force, and the result is a film as gorgeous, and as enigmatic, as the painting itself. Girl with a Pearl Earring is a glowing, moving work of art, a film whose narrative and ideas are so deeply embedded in its images that many scenes are virtually wordless. Watching it, you begin to realize the rarity of Webber's accomplishment: In an age when Tarantino dialogue-a-thons and chunks of exposition are the norm, Webber understands that filmmaking, like painting, is an art where the eyes trump the ears.

Adapted from Tracy Chevalier's bestseller, Girl with a Pearl Earring imagines the painter's muse to be a poor housemaid named Griet (Scarlett Johansson), forced to work in the tense Vermeer household when her blind father loses his job. Anxious and lonely, Griet tentatively navigates the family's shaky power structure, keeping her hands busy and her eyes cast down (when she raises them, the gesture has the force of an exclamation). Everything revolves around the maintenance of Vermeer's output, the commissioned paintings on which the family's survival depends.

As played by Colin Firth, Vermeer is an intense, subtly unhappy man. Beset by a clinging, pregnant wife, tumbling children and a controlling mother-in-law (a steely Judy Parfitt) obsessed with maintaining her daughter's comfortable lifestyle, Vermeer retreats to the sanctuary of his studio where he paints with fearful concentration. No wonder his attention is caught by a housemaid who understands that cleaning the windows will alter his light--he responds to her with the hunger of someone surrounded by many yet understood by none.

With scarcely a word, the film signals Vermeer's growing respect for Griet's artistic instincts as he teaches her to mix his paints and, in a particularly lovely moment, tacitly acknowledges the rightness of her gesture when she moves one of his props. Throughout, scenes are structured to suggest the artist's actual work, and cinematographer Eduardo Serra delivers frame after frame of sumptuously detailed imagery. From the bustling Delft marketplace to the textures of the Vermeer household, Serra and Webber give us so much to look at we're constantly sensing the offscreen activity. As a result, the movie has a vitality and openness that's exactly the opposite of most period drama.

On one level, Girl with a Pearl Earring is filled with pulp stereotypes, from vinegary mothers-in-law to wealthy sexual predators--not to mention the familiar face-off between ripe servant and delicately pregnant wife. But the film's real pleasures are subterranean, hidden in fleeting glances and demurely loaded body language. As she proved in Lost in Translation, Johansson has a special gift for this; indeed, so understated is her performance that when Griet is forcefully propositioned by Vermeer's hedonistic patron (a lip-smacking Tom Wilkinson), the incident is nearly as shocking as an actual rape.

Despite the suggestiveness of the film's trailers, Webber's film is less concerned with sexual attraction than intellectual curiosity and the restrictions of class. Both Griet and her employer are profoundly confined: she by the rigid codes of her sex and station, he by the philistine demands of his family and patrons. Together, they experience what most of us long for: a true synchronicity of the soul.