Earlier this week, I blew off work and went to The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Set in the 1660s in Holland, it’s based on this novel and tells a fictional story about the subject of Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece.
The fusty, fussy Colin Firth and the excellent Scarlett Johansson–an actress apparently type-cast to have complex relationships with men twice her age (see also Lost in Translation, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ghostworld and The Horse Whisperer–well, I suppose that last one is more like four times)–star as Vermeer and his new maid, respectively. The maid is sent off to work for Vermeer and his overbearing wife, but, uh, brings more to the table as the film goes on.
This film has all the chopping, grinding and boiling of Like Water for Chocolate, all of the broken barriers of the servants and the served of Gosford Park and all of the sexual repression of every Merchant-Ivory picture ever made.
With one exception, the film is a well-made biopic period piece. The exception, however, fascinated me. The filmmakers have gone to great lengths, I think, to make the film feel like the Dutch paintings of that period (namely, Vermeer, Rembrandt and their contemporaries). It’s quite a dark film, with earthy tones and a restricted focus.
In fact, many scenes in the film are set up to be exactly like famous paintings. I recognized a few, which was kind of intellectually satisfying. What was more interesting, however, was the ones I kind of, maybe, sort of recognized. I would see a shot or scene, and somewhere, way back in my reptilian brain stem, would feel like I’d seen it before. It was an odd thing, to have this constant feeling of vague recognition. The movie felt strangely familiar, yet I could rarely identify why.
Here’s what the other critics thought.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I’d really like to see this movie because I really enjoyed the book and want to see how it adapts to the screen.
The description of how they made the paints was one of the more historically interesting aspects on the book, in my opinion.