Deborah Lipp

Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003) 9/10
Griet (Scarlett Johansson) comes to work as a maid in the home of painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) in 17th Century Holland.

“Girl With a Pearl Earring” is a haunting and mysterious painting. It has been called “the Dutch Mona Lisa” because of the opaque, captivating expression on the face of its unknown model. Indeed, little is known of the life of Vermeer, offering a blank canvas, first for the novelist Tracy Chevalier, and then for this very faithful adaptation.

The movie itself is a canvas. Water reflects deep colors that shimmer. Floor tiles contrast fabrics which pick up light from windows, reflected on brassware. Composition of every scene is as perfect as a painting.

Many reviewers complain that there is no narrative substance to the movie; it’s just a pretty picture. I disagree. As Griet, Johansson shows us the inner turmoil of a girl between worlds. She cannot express herself except by the look in her enormous eyes, but if you pay attention, you can come to know her. Griet’s father was a tradesman, a tile painter, and she shares his artistic sensibility. As the film opens, we see her arranging sliced vegetables in an attractive display for no reason but her own aesthetic pleasure. Now her father has been blinded in an accident (which the novel describes; the movie merely shows us the ruined man, and that’s enough), and Griet must take a job as a maid.

This is a lowering of her social class, and also puts her among people of an entirely different class. Griet does the laundry, working with lye and bleach, and her hands and arms gradually roughen and redden. Bit by bit, she becomes the person she couldn’t imagine she’d be, but she doesn’t embrace it. She is at home nowhere, but must make a home somehow; in a corner of the dusty basement of the Vermeer home, where her cot is, she sets up a favorite tile given to her by her father. How expressive that tile is—of her isolation, of her hope, of her desperate need for beauty!

There is a complex power struggle going on in the Vermeer household, and Griet becomes a pawn in it. Vermeer’s mother-in-law (Judy Parfitt) runs the house with an iron fist. Money is tight because Vermeer paints slowly. Vermeer and his wife are sometimes tender and loving towards each other, but she is emotional, tense, fearful, and perpetually pregnant. The many children (history tells us the Vermeers had eleven children who lived, but the film seems to show about seven) play the normal games of childhood, meaning they are bratty, destructive, and angry; they, too, sense the tension among the adults, and they enact their own power plays on the only victims they have—the servants.

Amidst all this, Griet finds comfort in the enormous beauty of Vermeer’s work, and Vermeer finds someone who appreciates his art and truly understands what he does. Their need for each other builds a silent erotic tension that throws off the delicate balance of the household. When a lecherous patron (Tom Wilkinson, who is very slimy indeed) demands a portrait of her, the intimate way that Vermeer and Griet are thrown together will inevitably lead to a final explosion.

Girl With a Pearl Earring is absolutely brilliant in the way it remains faithful to its era. No, Griet will not run off and become an artist. Women, especially of her class, had no such option. The options taken by all the characters are only those available to them. This throws many viewers off-guard, they want people to behave the way they do in movies. But in Girl With a Pearl Earring, the characters don’t concede that it’s a movie; they are as silent, as angry, as taut, as yearning, and as unfulfilled as they are in real life.