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Performance Comments From Reviews |
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ePinions Online Colin Firth, probably best known for his comedic roles in "Bridget Jones’ Diary" "What a Girl Wants" and the recent hit romantic-comedy "Love Actually" gives his most accomplished performance to date. Firth brings in an awe-inspiring performance as Vermeer where he displays elements of vulnerability as this tortured artist trying to compromise his own integrity while dealing with what everyone wants from him, except Griet. Firth even brings some brash sex appeal to the role that would probably make women want to become his muse. Firth also is charismatic in his performances, even in the scenes with Essie Davis as he plays a loving but troubled husband while in the scenes with Tom Wilkinson, we see him as someone quiet until a scene when Van Ruijven grabs Griet in an uncomforting way where Firth plays the man in shining armor trying to protect his muse. Firth, no doubt, should get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in this role, he'd be a good opponent against Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation", Paul Giamatti in "America Splendor" and Sean Penn for his roles in "21 Grams" and "Mystic River." This is, by far, my favorite performance from the enigmatic Colin Firth. |
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USA Today - December 11, 2003 Firth plays the artist, about whom little is known historically, with a blend of smoldering intensity and quiet understatement. He is meant to be enigmatic, as is Griet in some ways. Yet we feel their growing attraction as she works in his studio; it reaches a climax when he pierces her ear with the earring that he asks her to wear for the portrait. It's a strangely compelling and sexy scene in a movie that is fraught with palpable, but unexpressed, passion. |
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"In Girl With a Pearl Earring, Colin Firth, in long, flowing musketeer locks that bring out an erotic dynamism he hasn't shown before, plays Vermeer quietly, with the intensity of the possessed, as if he were looking through people instead of at them. .......Colin Firth is sexy and forceful as Johannes Vermeer...." -Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly |
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"Johansson’s brave and intelligent innocence is nicely balanced by Firth’s worldly, compassionate admiration of his painting's subject." - Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter |
| However he excels here as the brooding painter, ill-at-ease at the world he finds himself in. The scenes between the two are particularly well played, and surrounded by a supporting cast that hits its mark every time. Tiscali Entertainment |
| And if Vermeer's very proper models — reading letters, pouring milk, playing a virginal — suggest this artist was a bit of a square, Ms. Chevalier, Mr. Webber, Mr. Firth and the screenwriter, Olivia Hetreed, have infused him with a fair dose of smoldering eroticism. New York Times, December 9, 2003 |
| Nevertheless, anybody who balks at slowness will be driven up the wall by this movie, not least by the shortfall of its romance. Years of Hollywood training lead us to expect that Colin Firth, as Vermeer, will come on strong to Scarlett Johansson—to assume that desire, like art, must surge across all boundaries. But, if ever a society was bounded, it was Holland in the seventeenth century, and, in defense of such decorum, I would say that the repression going on between Firth and Johansson is more of a turn-on than most of the hot news that movies like to bring us from twenty-first-century bedrooms. Watch the two of them huddled beneath the blackout cloth of a camera obscura, or Vermeer showing Griet how to grind shellac and lapis lazuli (the shards even sound delicious in the hand) while preparing his pigments. - New Yorker Magazine, December 10, 2003 |
