Peter Webber (2003)

The images are meticulously composed and lit to suggest Jan Vermeer paintings – as you’d expect. This is no small feat on the part of Peter Webber and his DoP Eduardo Serra but it doesn’t make for dramatic energy or depth in this adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s fictional account of how Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ (c 1665) came to be. The servant girl, Griet, who is the model for the painting, is the first-person narrator of Chevalier’s novel. Olivia Hetreed’s screenplay eschews voiceover narrative. It’s an admirable decision in principle and Scarlett Johansson’s interpretation of Griet is intelligent and carefully nuanced but, from her first appearance, she’s a face in waiting for the film’s climactic moment, the revelation of the completed painting. There’s a Cinderella quality to Griet: she’s not just any servant girl – she’s had to get work in Vermeer’s household because her father, a Delftware painter, has recently gone blind and can no longer work to keep his family. Scarlett Johansson, her face made all the more distinctive by pale make-up and dyed eyebrows, always looks a cut above.

The first appearance of Vermeer, played by Colin Firth, is a different kind of problem. Peter Webber makes the mistake of a long, expectations-raising build-up to it. Before the audience gets sight of him, Firth’s voice has been heard – raised slightly in an argument between Vermeer and his wife Catharina. This is an early hint of their unhappy marriage – Firth’s snotty, peevish tone also lets you know what you’re in for in terms of his performance. Tanneke, one of the other maids in the household, warns Griet that her new master ‘has a temper on him even though he’s quiet’ yet nothing happens to suggest roiling depths beneath Vermeer’s customary reserve. Except for one scene, in which the great painter demonstrates a camera obscura to Griet and is delightedly surprised by her wonderment, Colin Firth expresses next to nothing. This reflects not only the actor’s limitations but also the director’s priorities. The vegetables being sliced under the opening titles and Vermeer’s paints and powders have much more colour and substance than most of the human life in evidence on screen – the cast’s primary purpose seems to be to resemble figures from art history.

Three actresses bring some animation to their characters: Joanna Scanlan, whose playing of Tanneke is vividly detailed; Essie Davis, who brings hysterical force to the thankless role of bitter, envious Catharina; and Judy Parfitt, as Catharina’s stern but anxious mother. But the emotional violence and power games of the story can never compete with the relentless tastefulness of the look of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Those vegetables at the start are assembled in a too classy arrangement. Even when Peter Webber and Eduardo Serra show the physically squalid aspects of seventeenth century Delft, the dirt looks tasteful. The music by Alexandre Desplat, although it’s one of his prettiest, most lyrical scores, reinforces this effect. With Tom Wilkinson as Vermeer’s lecherous patron and Cillian Murphy, too suave as the butcher’s boy who is Griet’s intended.

26 May 2014