Movies about art – specifically the creative process and its inspirations – present filmmakers with unique challenges. How do you get inside the mind of a great artist? How do you convey an artist’s inspiration on film? And how do you make painting – a process that’s time-consuming and rarely thrill-a-minute – compelling enough to carry viewers through a feature film?
These questions have been taken on a number of times, and sometimes with success. Pollack did it by focusing on the painter’s personal struggles with alcohol and other demons. And it doesn’t hurt that Jackson Pollack’s painting technique was about as eye-catching as they come. Artemisia – another successful drama about a painter – worked by focusing on relationships – some of them scandalous – between the characters, and by dramatizing the artistic process stylishly.
Girl with a Pearl Earring tries – with partial success – to tread in the footprints of previous movies about art and artists, focusing on the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and specifically the painting that shares the movie’s name. It’s an interesting premise – to tell a compelling story of a young servant in Vermeer’s home (Griet, played by Scarlett Johansson), her unwitting personal entanglement with Vermeer (Colin Firth), and ultimately her appearance in a painting that is widely familiar to this day. You could do this with any famous painting – create a fiction to explain its origins and the motivations behind it. And the possibilities are virtually endless.
In this case, it’s the makings of an historical costume drama that gives Johansson an opportunity to quietly dominate the screen. In fact, Johansson does so well that her co-star, the reliable Firth, ends up short-changed – left in the background of scenes that he really should dominate.
The story follows Griet as she is forced by her father’s disability to go to work as a servant. Hired on as a maid at Vermeer’s house, she finds herself witnessing the strains caused by Vermeer’s artistic inconsistency, and his increasing alienation from his wife. Griet is sweet, quiet and innocent, but there’s something about her natural beauty that entrances Vermeer, and also catches the eye of his primary patron, Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson). As Vermeer’s fascination with Griet grows, the potential for a scandal grows. Pulled into it all unwillingly – and to a considerable extent unaware – Griet finds her job and her future at risk.
Girl with a Pearl Earring looks great. Director Peter Webber’s team has done a super job of recreating Delft, Holland in 1665. The sets, costumes and make-up all are top-notch. Add to that the understated performance of Johansson and good complementary work by the rest of the cast, and you have the makings of a solid historical drama. It’s odd, though, that the film’s greatest strength – the focus on Griet and Johansson’s appealing performance – ends up taking away from what you’d expect to be its highlight – shedding light on Vermeer, his motivations and inspiration. Compared to Griet, Vermeer seems a secondary character, and we never get as strong a sense of what he’s about as the filmmakers obviously had intended.
Still, it’s fascinating to see a great work of art explained in this way, even if it is a fiction, and the look of the film and its heartbreakingly appealing performance by Johansson make it worth seeing, even if the Vermeer angle doesn’t hit home as strongly as it might have.
