Girl with a Pearl Earring
Cast
Colin Firth .... Johannes Vermeer
Scarlett Johansson .... Griet
Tom Wilkinson .... Van Ruijven
Judy Parfitt .... Maria Thins
Cillian Murphy .... Pieter
Directed by
Peter Webber
Rater #2 has description and review.
Rater #1
Has Not Seen Movie
Rater #2
3/10. It's hard to think up ideas for novels. So hard that eventually you
make a novel that's a fictional story about a painting. When it gets
down to that, it's sad, but then when they make a movie about it is
the lowest tier. That's the case with Girl with a Pearl Earring, an
insanely overly dramatic version of Tracy Chevalier's supposedly
acclaimed novel. The results by this half-baked script by Olivia
Hetreed are unintentionally hilarious. I mean this, I was almost
rolling on the floor with laughter during this movie.
The script here is, as I said before, laughably bad. Every other shot
where there's dialogue (which is extremely scarce) someone's spewing
some sort of pithy quote or another. And they aren't the type that
can be used as signatures on message boards, they're just blatantly
scripted and worthless. Another example of this script's atrocity is
when people look at paintings. When Griet (Scarlett Johansson) sees a
painting of her, she doesn't say something like "It's beautiful". She
doesn't even say something like "It brings out my eyes." She actually
says "You saw right through me!" I didn't know dialogue could get
this bad, but obviously it can.
Every single character overacts so much they deserve to have their
own soap opera. In fact, Girl with a Pearl Earring is basically a 90
minute long soap opera set in the 17th century. Actually, I wouldn't
be surprised if ABC picked it up for next season. Anyway, Johansson,
brilliant in Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn't There and Lost in
Translation, but here she goes for a "subtle" performance, and, to
tell the truth, it's horrible. She is constantly mugging to the
camera by not being able to keep her face still for even a seocnd,
and she can't accurately portray a servant from that time. Colin
Firth, playing artist Johannes Vermeer, seems to understand the time
period more, but when not yelling for no particular reason, just
doesn't work. Every other small character in this underdeveloped film
goes for the way-too-loud method of acting and just had me cracking
up.
I saw Girl with a Pearl Earring about a week before the Oscars, for
which it had three nominations. It did, in fact, have good
cinematography, but the costumes seemed to be derived from history
books and looked pretty cheesy. I'm not very familiar with art
direction, so I can't comment on that, but thankfully it wasn't
nominated for anything sound-related. Whenever people talk offscreen,
it's obvious that those people are just in a recording booth, talking
into microphones. Whatever authenticity there was disappeared then.
The music score were pretty good, albeit repetitive. Because of the
mix of cinematography and music, GWAPE wasn't torturous to sit
through, but just because I survived it doesn't make it a good movie.
Rated PG-13 for some sexual content.
Running time: 95 minutes
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