But it all comes down to money. All this—the tiny, bitter world with all its intrigues—exists only at the will and pleasure of Vermeer’s patron, a local nobleman played by Tom Wilkinson (“In the Bedroom”). The constant production of paintings and babies may sound cruel to us, but at the time it made good financial sense. Griet’s entire existence is based around her teetering on the edge of homelessness. She must weave the most precarious of lines between Vermeer and his wife, not just because she is drawn to him, yet is also a moral person who resists, but also because she knows that displeasing either of them might cost her job. When the butcher boy (Cillian Murphy) approaches Griet and her family after church, her mother (Gabrielle Reidy) asks him “what do you do?” When he tells her, she remarks “that is a good trade,” and her parental interference between the two of them has ended. The boy, who is well-meaning if a little insolent, knows that a girl with few prospects had probably better marry, and he tries to make their courtship as painless as possible.
The mother-in-law oversees all these soap opera shenanigans with a Machiavellian eye, seeing more than she lets on. She is willing to tolerate whatever gets the paintings out on time to ensure money for the present, as well as whatever gets the babies out on time to ensure the marriage and the money for the future that comes with hardworking offspring. That art is both an escape from his life’s woes and his greatest commodity surely stings Vermeer.
The film’s only major weakness is Vermeer’s patron, who doesn’t seem so much like a human being as a plot device for setting things in motion. That he hungers for Griet and that his power and wealth have made him accustomed to having his way with the lower classes is understandable. He seems to have turned the Vermeer household into his own little fishbowl, and toys with and tortures its members for his own pleasure, just to prove that he can. That he is so one-dimensionally villainous, without motivation, is jarring in a movie in which all the other major players are so developed and complex. It is he who mentions the predicament of the master and the maid to Vermeer and Griet, to their faces while he grins mischievously, and we’re never given any reason why he is so cruel.
Like one of Vermeer’s domestic paintings, “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is a movie in which not very much seems to be happening, besides the cooking and the cleaning. But, in its subtle way, we learn about the struggle for power and dignity that Vermeer is waging against his patron and his mother-in-law, and we can see how Griet is struggling between her impulses to be loyal, loved, and yet not become a pawn. Like those same paintings, if we look closely, everything is happening.
Finished January 21st, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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