Sometimes, making a salad is about much more than chopping vegetables. Sometimes, it's art...especially, I suspect, if you're making lunch for one of the greatest artists in history. That very activity opens Peter Webber's exquisitely rendered new film, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, and the measured care and artful rendering of the onions, beets, and carrots lets the audience know right away that this is merely a salad...this is A Salad, each piece meticulously photographed as if it were a life study for one of the great masters or the pretext for an Oscar nomination.

It may very well be. Based on the best-selling novel by Tracy Chevalier, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING is an uneven but imaginative bodice-ripper about the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, whose most famous masterpiece gives the film its title. Few facts are known about the painter's life, and the painting's subject -- a young, exquisitely vulnerable girl in rapt wonder -- is lost completely to history. Chevalier's charming but simple conceit is to fashion a fantasy of constrained love and social mores, making the young girl, Griet (Scarlett Johanssen), a serving maid in the home of the unhappily married Vermeer (Colin Firth). Director Webber and his wife, screenwriter Olivia Hetreed, have adapted the book into a languorous, quietly mesmeric romantic drama of artistic (and other pressing) urges.

GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING suffers badly from a flaw in design -- its elegant, brooding construction is diametrically at odds with the tortured passion of its story. The film tries to spark repeatedly to life -- in sparks of young love (when Griet meets a young butcher, played with dreamy fogginess by 28 Days Later's Cillian Murphy) and in sparks of inspiration (in Vermeer's studio, where the creation of his masterpieces gives the film its best moments). But the atmosphere of Webber's vision, thick with social grace and art-house formalist pretensions, dampens any fires that promise to start. The film's subject is the tug-of-war between erotic awakening and cultural stagnation, but the same might very well be said of the film itself.

When watching GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, one gets the eerie sensation of walking through a Dutch Masters exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eerie, but not unpleasant -- indeed, like any good art exhibition, there are moments of stunning beauty and striking dramatic flair woven in amongst the more tedious moments. In this EARRING, many of the best moments are due to the formidable abilities of Johanssen, whose tremulous, textured turn adds to her string of impressive performances in Lost In Translation, The Man Who Wasn't There, and Ghost World, making her arguably the most interesting actress of her (very young) generation. After being assigned to clean the master's studio, Griet wanders soundlessly around the room before stumbling upon Vermeer's latest work...a jaw-dropping portrait that stops her cold. Through Johanssen's eyes, the transformational glory of art is revealed to the audience in exquisite detail. Later, when she moves a chair out of Vermeer's life study without permission, the wordless act of defiance becomes a plaintive statement of the place she wants in his life, to be a participant in his artistic life. It is a sublime, transcendent moment that Vermeer recognizes, as he realizes that, finally, there is someone who understands his artistic soul.

Vermeer, you see, is at the mercy of his patron Van Ruijven (Tom Wilkinson), a man who loves art but has little understanding of its higher purposes. Vermeer's crusty mother-in-law, Maria (Judy Parfitt), is no better, seeing each painting only for its economic value as a commission. Distant from his vain wife and spoiled children, Firth informs Vermeer with a wracking spiritual pain, despising his life but utterly impotent to change it. His obsessive objectification of Griet is born as much out of loneliness as of romance; his inability to touch the object of his affection, even privately, speaks wordless volumes.

The art-exhibit aura of GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING is further enhanced by the magnificent cinematography of Eduardo Serra (Wings of the Dove), who lights each frame with impeccable muted colorings. Serra's camera frames its subjects as precisely as Vermeer's brush did, and only occasionally do the luxurious touches seem obvious and overdone. Matching Serra's attention to detail are production designer Ben Van Os and art director Christina Schaffer, who create an entire landscape that folds effortlessly into Vermeer's painting style. Muted colors are the norm, but suddenly a shock -- a blood-purple eggplant, a lapis lazuli headwrap, or a milky-perfect pearl -- shakes Griet's world in seismic magnificence, as if touched by the hand of Vermeer, or even God, himself.

Moody and self-conscious, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING remains quite affecting nonetheless; its flaws are almost as interesting as its strengths. Art history, even of the fictitious sort that frequently pops up at the cinema, has rarely been so provocatively fascinating; there's probably an entire class now to be taught in film school curriculums. I see it as Art Masters As Dramatic Subjects, including Ed Harris' Pollock, Anthony Hopkins' Surviving Picasso, and the Robert Altman-directed Vincent and Theo. Imperfect masterpieces one and all. GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING can sit comfortable, even remarkably, among them.

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