Griet? Is she the one with all the shit in her face?

Girl with the Pearl Earring

I cannot write a review of this movie without using the word "dull." It's just a fact of life. I think it was actually part of the intention of the filmmakers, much like a PBS documentary or something. They know it is going to be dry and boring but they make it anyway.

The painting is real, it is really by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. The story behind it is unknown so some dude wrote a book about how it hypothetically could have come to be (much like Black Dahlia was a bunch of bullshit spun around the real life 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in LA), basing the story around a young girl who comes to live with the Vermeer family as a maid and has a moment with Jon where they bond over her interest in/ fascination with his art and he ends up painting her in a work that ends up being his masterpiece - the Dutch Mona Lisa, I am told - and the name is due to his use of the pearl earring as a focal point. That, in turn, is dramatized by the long, slow zoom out from an extreme close shot of the earring to the painting as a whole that occurs near the end.

Whew, wait, let me take a step back, I am getting to into describing things. This, by the way, is the actual point of the movie. All the subtly layered detail, nuance, history, story... things you would appreciate more after a half-hour college level art history lecture on 17th Century Dutch artists. It also belies the problem with watching the film- that a modern viewer is going to miss a lot of the subtlety and not pick up on the portrayal of interactions between social groups in the period and place.

So Colin Firth is the long-haired artist, he has a bitchy jealous wife (who has at least some room to be jealous, though an actual sexual affair, at least in this instance, is not taking place) and bratty daughter, and a bunch of other kids. His family is to some extent dependent on Tom Wilkinson buying his paintings, so you get lots of scenes of people who are motivated or pressured by people with more power then them (both the Vermeer family to the count and the servants to the family).

The story starts when Scarlett has to go be a maid because her family is poor. Her dad was an artist (painting ceramic tiles?) not a rich one like Firth but still an artist, but recently he went blind and can't work. So this explains her situation as well as her predisposition to being teacher's pet to Colin Firth. She also meets a butcher's apprentice, the one and only Clillian Murphy. He is more on her level and a much more suitable match. He is very interested, she is somewhat interested back.

Eventually rich and lascivious old Tom Wilkinson fancies Greit and commissions a painting of her- as well as a deal to have her for his own *ahem* maid. Scarlett and everybody else know what is implied by the deal. She hooks up with Cillian in a very brief love scene, and I think it is partially motivated by fear at being basically sold to the old count, and she at least wants to be with a guy she likes first.

The painting is the masterpiece "Girl with the Pearl Earring." The wife is insulted that the peasant girl wears her jewelry and is the subject of her husbands great work. "why not me?" She asks. And is told she doesn't understand art and stuff the way Scarlett does. Needless to say Scarlett gets kicked out of the house after that.

What I wasn't sure of until reading the internet is that she does in fact end up going to live with Cillian Murphy in the end. I assume this is how the book ends as well.

It was dull, the story moved very slowly and there weren't any real twists. It didn't build up do anything. There were big dramatic scenes like when the wife finally storm up and demands to see the picture but it's all based on rules and customs and beliefs that we don't really understand. When the picture is revealed the wife is upset: "How could you! It's indecent! Why don't you paint me like that?" and then the picture is revealed and, yeah it's just the same one on the cover of the DVD we've seen 100 times and we're like "oh, that's it? She's not naked or anything? Just a girl with an earring? Did I miss something? I don't get it." But the creepy old guy stares at it and the family kicks her out over it...

Maybe I just don't have as much of an appreciation for art. but that's another subject for another day. GWTPE is good, just know what you are getting into. Cillian is just a background character who provides a good, honest guy for Scarlett. The artist and her have a thing but it is not romantic, Cillian is her romantic interest. He is a little forgettable in this one, but then again, the whole movie is a little forgettable. Glad I made this blog entry detailed because in a few months I would have troubling remembering it for detail at all.