Envisioning a chain of events that might have led to the Vermeer painting of the same name: the coming to the Master's household of a chaste young maid, daughter of a blinded Delft tile painter, and her inch-by-inch entrée to the artist's atelier by virtue of her demonstrated interest in and sensitivity to and appreciation of his work -- a privilege withheld from his baby-machine wife -- even to the extent of improving the composition of a work-in-progress by taking it upon herself to reposition a chair (yes, X-rays have shown that Vermeer indeed painted over a chair in Woman with a Water Jug, but they don't show that it wasn't his own idea), and finally becoming the inspiration and the model for the titular masterwork. The mutual attraction between master and maid, a matter of pregnant looks and the close proximity of fingertips, never approaches the sexual, unless you count the symbolism of the ear piercing and its hymenal (or hymenesque) spot of blood. It may just as well have been sexual, however, to judge by the way the maid's breath quickens and catches and the way the wife rages when she gets wind of the secret portrait and storms into the inner sanctum: "It's obscene!" The whole thing manifests itself as understatedly ludicrous, quietly overwrought, demurely melodramatic, blushingly novelettish, a would-be bodice ripper in impregnable Calvinist clothing. And it is hard to escape the essential impression of an envious and covetous outsider, trying, out of the most reverential motives, to horn in on the artistic process, to experience vicariously the power of genius, hopefully to get a particle of it to rub off somehow -- in short, an impression of the art-studio equivalent to the locker-room jock-sniffer. (A smock-sniffer, maybe?) The foregoing is a profile that fits alike the original novelist Tracy Chevalier, the screenwriter Olivia Hetreed, the first-time director Peter Webber, and naturally the wish-fulfilling heroine who serves as their appointed deputy. There is undoubtedly some elementary educational value in the documentation of the clothes, the interiors, the daily tasks, the painting techniques of 17th-century Holland, although it might be questioned whether Scarlett Johansson's lips are suitable for casting in any period prior to the Age of Collagen. The air of scrupulous research is everywhere undeniable: a nice way of saying that the movie feels stuffy, lifeless, bone-dry. And the technically proficient photography of Eduardo Serra, in constant competition with the Dutch Master in quest of that sideways white light, has the inevitable effect (again out of the most reverential motives) of diminishing the precious few Vermeers that survive, first by suggesting that any old someone could have noticed and reproduced the painter's visions, and second by flooding the market with facsimiles. Colin Firth, Judy Parfitt, Tom Wilkinson. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd