Genre: drama

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Directed by Peter Webber

Written by Olivia Hetreed

Starring Scarlett Johansson,

Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson

Classification: PG

Rating: ***

At first glance, even second, there looks to be no motion in the picture. It seems as static as you'd expect from a movie that's all about a painting. But watch a little longer, think a little harder, and something interesting happens. The film begins to acquire at least some of the magical properties of its famous subject -- layers start to emerge, layers of light and colour and meaning, and Girl with a Pearl Earring comes alive. Only then does it talk to us, delivering in muted tones a rather daunting message: Fine art needs fine perceivers, or else it will turn crude.

Of course, the piece of art under consideration is the celebrated work from the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. It shows a young woman in a makeshift turban, her eyes wide, lips parted and full, the titled pearl dangling from her left ear lobe, her expression a puzzle mingling sadness with joy, enigmatic enough that critics have dubbed her the Mona Lisa of the north. In her novel, Tracy Chevalier did at length what many of us do instinctively. She converted the painting into a narrative, inventing a backstory for the girl, and writing the book in the voice of this conceived character -- a mere servant, unschooled and naive but always observant and strongly intuitive.

The challenge of the screenplay is to find a cinematic equivalent for that interior voice, an especially tricky task since the plot is minimal here -- not a whole lot occurs outside of her head. Is the challenge met? Partly. The script does well to preserve the themes, and, beyond that, the tradeoff is obvious: What we lose in psychological depth is gained in visual appeal -- the movie is gorgeous to behold and, in the alluring person of Scarlett Johansson, so is its star.

She plays Griet, a teenager torn from her own humble family and pressed into service at the Vermeer household. Making his feature debut, and drawing on his documentary background, director Peter Webber is quick to establish the rigours of underclass life in 17th-century Holland -- the cramped sleeping quarters, the stench of the adjacent canal, the daily grind of scrubbing and laundering. The ménage chez Vermeer is stolidly Catholic and very large.

His brood of children and his ever-pregnant wife all fall under the watchful gaze of Maria, his shrewd mother-in-law, who owns the house and pinches every penny. However, in the midst of this chaotic sprawl, there is an oasis of calm: The master's studio, separated from the other rooms and brighter, its windows admitting the precious light. We see it when Griet does, her first day on the job, accompanied by her mistress's stern admonition: "Disturb nothing."

Cue the disturbance. Like everything else here, it happens gradually and with subtlety. At first, Vermeer (Colin Firth) is merely glimpsed at the edges of the picture, a near-silent figure with long hair and a short manner -- curt, unsmiling. Instead, the initial focus is on the people around him, and on how each of them views his art as a means to an end -- a supply of income to his pecuniary mother-in-law, a totem of loyalty to his jealous wife, a source of status to his loud-mouthed patron (Tom Wilkinson). To them, art only has extrinsic value; intrinsically, it's worthless: "They're just paintings, paintings for money -- they mean nothing."

But Griet knows better. Entering his studio to dust and clean, an allegedly ignorant girl marvels at the layered evolution of a work-in-progress, instinctively grasping how colour and perspective and composition all dance together to animate the canvas. Recognizing a kindred spirit, an aesthetic soul mate, Vermeer tutors her in the mixing of pigments, and shows her the mirrored innards of his camera obscura, explaining that "It's an image made of light." Of course, so is his art, so is the movie we're watching, and the two begin their own mating dance, moving toward the climactic moment when the film morphs completely into the painting whose name it bears.

Some will argue that it takes too long to get there, offering scant diversion en route. Others will find the sights arresting and the theme enriching -- it's all a matter of perception. Nevertheless, there can be no disagreement over Johansson's performance. An extraordinary embodiment of the period, she looks to have stepped right into a Vermeer frame. We recently saw her in Lost in Translation, and very few actors could manage the transition from a night in Tokyo all the way back to the days of the Dutch Golden Age -- yet Johansson, blessed with a face for all seasons, makes the trip without breaking stride.

Nor will anyone dispute the power of one luminous sequence, an extended scene where the master invites the servant into his imagination, asking the girl to pose for eternity. The imagery is entirely sexual: He pierces her ear, preparing for the pearl drop to come; he removes her bonnet, unloosing a cascade of golden hair; he insists that she open her mouth, that she wet her lips, that she widen her enraptured eyes.

Yes, the imagery is palpably sensual, but it's just imagery. In the outside world, where Griet must deal with the mundane embraces of her dull boyfriend, or the lewd advances of that rapacious patron, sex is all too real. But here, in the transforming light of the studio, it's symbolic; here, life is being penetrated by art -- reconceived, reordered, reshaped by art. The artist has seduced his subject for the purpose of creation. But in this case, because she's such a sensitive accomplice, because she sees his work so clearly, the seduced becomes one with the seducer. Griet is both in the painting and outside the painting; she is the fine art and she is the fine art's keen perceiver -- each needs the other to exist.

At least, that's the lofty claim of Girl with a Pearl Earring, a picture that asks of its audience exactly what Vermeer demanded of his -- to look past the static appearance and discover the dynamic reality. But the painter backed up his demand, and the movie can't -- not quite, not fully. It isn't an exciting work of art so much as a contemplative reverie on the nature of art -- and what's wrong with a smart essay that unfolds like a sweet dream?