"Beauty inspires obsession."

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003): 3/10

Poster (c) Lions Gate Films

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.

Review Date: February 21, 2004