As Vermeer's servant girl Griet, Scarlett Johansson drifts through GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING with her plump, moist lips hanging slightly open and her wide-eyed gaze fixed on whatever she's looking at, her expression ranging from simple innocence to innocent bewilderment to innocent perplexity to innocent confusion to innocent awe – a tonal range of about half an octave. Johansson fits right in with the rest of the cast, all of whom are forced by the screenplay to depict their characters as one-trait ponies. Based on Tracy Chevalier's best-selling novel of the same name, the screenplay for GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING is one of those concentrated preparations of baloney, corn, ham, cotton candy, and confectioner's sugar out of which all phony, clichéd Hollywood love stories are made.

In this particular love-story subvariation ("The Love That Can Never Be"), what doesn't happen is far more important than what does happen. In her slow, dimwitted way, the gorgeous Griet realizes that she is deeply desired by three men – two virile, intense young hunks (Colin Firth as Vermeer and Cillian Murphy as the butcher's son Pieter) and one virile, intense middle-aged lecher (Tom Wilkinson as Vermeer's patron Van Ruijven). Vermeer loves Griet because he can see the pure beauty inside her, and she loves Vermeer because he can paint beautiful pictures, so of course the audience wants the two of them to get it on while the other guys take a hike. Alas, the middle-aged lecher nearly rapes her, and in a moment of confusion she allows the butcher's son to ravish her, but Griet and Vermeer respect each other so much that all they ever do is stare at each other in adoration and let their hands brush together momentarily when she's helping him to mix his paints. Not even a kiss, I kid you not.

Instead, there is a torrid symbolic consummation. Near the end of the film, Vermeer decides he wants Griet to wear one of his wife's pearl earrings for the painting he is doing of Griet. After much innocent protestation, she finally agrees to let him pierce one of her ears. The erotic excitement builds to a fever pitch as he heats an ice pick over the flame of a candle. Trembling, she tips her head to one side, and then, with a little gasp, she gives up her earlobe's virginity and lets him effect penetration with the hot, sharp point of his tool. 

The special effect of "The Love That Can Never Be" subvariation is that it satisfies the women in the audience by not satisfying them, that is to say, it subjects them to the exquisitely poignant and heartrendingly bittersweet emotional torture that all women are genetically programmed to masochistically crave, but it also satisfies the men in the audience by giving them lots of pornographic fantasy fodder, that is to say, precisely because the filmmakers haven't allowed Colin Firth to put the blocks to Scarlett Johansson, male viewers will immediately become compulsively fixated on imagining him doing so, or to be more precise, on imagining themselves filling in for him, since to be fair in this analysis we must acknowledge that all men are genetically programmed to spend half their lives casting themselves as the stars of the X-rated daydreams inside their headbones.

As is obligatory in Hollywood love stories of every variation, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING surges and swells with gushy, melodramatic music designed to manipulate the audience into feeling just the right emotion before each scene begins. (This technique carries a hidden message for the moviegoer:  "We know you're hopelessly stupid, so we'll tell you in advance when to laugh, when to cry, when to feel angry, etc.") 

Eduardo Serra's cinematography is equally contrived. Nearly every camera shot is carefully composed and lighted to look like a Vermeer painting. In scene after scene, we see the faces of the characters glowing like gold in the natural light from an open window in a room that's otherwise dark and lushly shadow-drenched. Like the rest of the movie, this visual effect is totally fake, totally out of touch with reality, but it's also quite beautiful and esthetically pleasing, similar to taking a stroll through an exhibition of the Dutch masters.

Frosty put it best as we were exiting the theater. "That sure was pretty," she whispered.  "If they'd left out the music and the dialogue, I would have loved it."