With skin the colour and texture of baby powder and the kind of bee-stung lips that have Biographical Dictionary of Film author David Thomson pleasuring himself in French (he unfortunately squandered the phrase "carnal embouchure" on Angelina Jolie), Scarlett Johansson would be cannily cast as the muse in any film, but her propensity to mug for the reaction shot--she has a rotating arsenal of squints and downward glances and contemplative pouts--gives her an actressy presence that's too familiar (i.e. insufficiently alien, with the exception of Johansson's physical perfection) for a milieu rarely, if ever, specifically depicted on celluloid.

Vermeer original/Johansson Memorex

In the B-plot, Johansson's chambermaid Griet catches the fancy of a butcher (Cillian Murphy) whose WB-ready look screams Trent Ford of the D'Urbervilles; there's a marketing cynicism fuelling his anachronistic prettiness that made me laugh every time he came on screen. And, of course, everyone has been encouraged to adopt a Merchant Ivory accent--the bid for period-piece street cred takes precedence over a provincial evocation of The Netherlands circa 1665. What's more, Johansson bears little resemblance to the "girl with a pearl earring," except perhaps around the eyes, and Webber's solution is to throw the Vermeer out of focus, withholding its actual unveiling for the closing credits; indeed, Griet would come off as mildly retarded if we were to see the painting in tandem with her observation, "Looks just like me," but the evasion is spectacularly obvious, providing further insurance that your mental train will never leave Biopic Station.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is not at a loss for terrific scenes, but they're also the major beats of the picture. Olivia Hetreed's adapted screenplay possibly attracted Webber because, with its crisply differentiated highs and lows, it has a stagebound quality--nothing here is incidentally or unself-consciously charged. Johansson lets out a startlingly erotic gasp as Vermeer (Colin Firth, typecast as a cold fish with a thawing heart) pierces her ear in preparation of the titular portrait (the real-life model for which remains unidentified), but the moment is such an unambiguous metaphor for the consummation of their frustratedly chaste bond that the appropriate reaction is one of apathy. The problem with Girl with a Pearl Earring is that it tries too hard to satisfy the arthouse mainstream and not hard enough to qualify its tenuous connection to art.

I replaced my Academy screener of Girl with a Pearl Earring with a retail copy in the vain hope that the latter would contain a better transfer. Alas. The consumer version's 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is identically problematic: blacks lean towards a sickly green, grain is so coarse as to suggest something closer to video noise, and the source print is less than pristine; the image seems outmatched by the loud, fantastically crisp Dolby Digital 5.1 audio from a technical standpoint, though the film's soundmix is certainly not as ambitious as its cinematography. And while the decided lack of shadow detail may also disappoint viewers, that I credited to the film's aesthetic--a desire to approximate the velvety texture of Baroque artwork.

A meagre helping of supplementary material includes the Sundance Channel's "Anatomy of a Scene" special on Girl with a Pearl Earring, which deconstructs the 'viewing feast' set-piece from adaptation (screenwriter Hetreed consolidated two sequences from the novel) to editing (in the quest to streamline a 200-minute rough cut, editor Kate Evans arguably sold the scene short). The blood-red lips that Johansson sports in her interview transform her every innocent observation ("The montage is the raw anatomy of the maid's lifestyle") into a kinky come-on, while producer Andy Peterson surely wound up siccing the union on director Webber by revealing that Joanna Scanlan, as servant Tanneke, was asked to dress the kitchen set in character before shooting commenced. Truman's ridiculous tie-in video--we're talking Falco flashback--for "Girl With a Pearl" (in which some fashionably broody rock star with a crush on a painting doesn't notice that a blonde Johansson has been beamed into his piano parlour) plus logo-concealed trailers for Girl with a Pearl Earring, its soundtrack CD, and Shattered Glass round out the disc.-Bill Chambers