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In Night Moves, Gene Hackman made the famous observation that seeing an Eric Rohmer film was like watching paint dry. He was wrong, but the comparison stuck for describing opaque, pretentious, and inert films. Peter Webber’s adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s twee novel Girl with a Pearl Earring is like watching three-century-old paint dry. It doesn’t hurt that the paint was handled by Jan Vermeer. Indeed, the sole delight of this Pearl is Eduardo Serra’s cinematography, which captures the radiance, the precision, and the otherworldliness of the artist’s sublime realism. At one point, Vermeer (Colin Firth) laments that he can’t find a subject. Look around, dummy! The whole world in this film looks like a Vermeer subject. But that’s part of the problem: the film is all tableaux and no vivants. What little drama there is involves the Vermeers’ new maid, Griet (Scarlett Johansson proving she can stand very still), who seems to spark something in the grumpy master, especially when she covertly rearranges items in his studio to improve his paintings’ compositions. Soon she’s grinding paints and even posing, her portrait figuring in the title canvas. Of course, Catharina Vermeer (Essie Davis), a dopy shrew resigned to popping out a baby every 10 months, gets annoyed — It’s her earring in the painting, after all. Although shedding no light on the mysteries of art, sex, power, or paint grinding, Pearl offers a visual beauty that’s worth a look. (99 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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