CHASING LIBERTY
Opens Fri., Jan. 9, at Pacific Place
From a postcard sent to Seattle Weekly from the 18-year-old daughter of our president, postmarked from Berlin: “Omigod! This has been such a crazy trip! First I ditch Mom and Dad (and the entire Secret Service) when this diplomatic conference in Prague gets boringI mean, what color miniskirt goes with diplomacy, anyway? Then I hop a train to Venice with this hunky photographer, Ben, and I’m like: Romance City, here we come! Right? Except Ben’s kind of a downerhe says life is ‘just a lot of odd smells and disappointment’and he’s totally not into me, even after I drop my towel (oops!) in our hotel room and let him get a nice long look. I dunnomaybe my Eurotrash friend Gabrielle is right: Guys don’t make passes at unpierced lasses. All I know is, my friend Lizzie McGuire never had this much trouble when she was in Italy! Of course I did get to bungee-jump with some nutty Germans and skinny-dip in the Rhineor was it the Rh� Anyway, kisses from Deutschland! Let’s hope I can get this hottie to fall for me before the Secret Service tracks us down! Love, Anna.” (PG-13) NEAL SCHINDLER
GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
Opens Fri., Jan. 9, at Seven Gables and Uptown
Has Scarlett Johansson ever been in a movie with a plot? Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Lost in Translation . . . and now this? Maybe she’s the new muse of the meandering and the atmospheric. Audiences, directors, and especially directors of photography love to stare at her soft, dewy features. Her best pose is repose, so you can understand why, in this still, handsome adaptation of the 1999 best seller by Tracy Chevalier, Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) chooses this household maid for a portrait commissioned by his chief patron, Van Ruijven (a hammy Tom Wilkinson), which today hangs in the Hague. Griet isn’t just a good pupil when Vermeer explains how light works; she seems to attract the stuff. Martin Amis wrote that one of his heroines appeared to be illuminated by her own personal cinematographer. Griet goes her one better: She’s got her own Dutch master, and a hunky, smoldering one to boot.
Yet the snickering subtext to the classic artists-and-models romance only remains a subtext here, however charged. (“Master and maidthere’s a tune we all know,” Van Ruijven insinuates, but alas not a tune we get to hear.) The greater tension comes from the jealousy that ripe, young Griet creates among the women in Vermeer’s householdhis simpering wife (Essie Davis), shrewd mother-in-law, and spiteful 12-year-old daughter. Girl is also oddly pedagogic as Vermeer teaches Griet about pigments, lets her mix his paint (not steamy or sensual in the slightest), and basically educates us about his craft while mentoring her. The film is so hushed and respectful that we hear the touch of bristles on canvas. Fine, but if we wanted art-history textbooks, we’d go to the library.
It’s all very PBS-y, yet even Upstairs, Downstairs had scandals and sex. There’s talk of how virile Vermeer has knocked up a succession of prior modelstalk, and not even much talk at that. Even though I like the way that the director summons up the daily domestic life of 1665 Delft, Girl rather dully subscribes to that old trope about the artist’s displacement of you-know-what into his art. They have to be kept chastely separate, unlike, say, the life of Picasso, who managed to paint and screw without his energy ever flagging. But I guess that’s a different movie. Here, there’s just a superfluous courtship subplot with 28 Days Later‘s Cillian Murphy to make a woman out of Griet; there’s a lovely scene of them walking by a wintry yellow canal in the snow, but it’s only there because it’s lovely, not because it makes sense.
Meanwhile, Firth’s saturnine Mr. Darcy charisma goes nowhere; he’s not much better used (he’s ill-used, really) than in Love Actually, only without all that splashing in the lake. I guess he’s biding his time while Ren饠Zellweger fattens up for the Bridget Jones sequel. As for lovely, lank, do-less Johansson, only 19, she’s graduating to high school in the SAT-theft movie The Perfect Score (Jan. 30). Let the other teen strivers worry about their double 800s; in my yearbook, she goes down as most likely to achieve by not achieving. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER
