the second time

I wouldn't read the book after watching the film. I DID read "Girl with the Pearl Earring" before watching that film. This feels like a mashup of "The Hours" styled hypernarrative (different time periods linked by an object or theme), "Pearl Earring", and an unfortunate toss-in (salt? Tabasco? guaranteed to get producers' attentions?) of unnecessary "Schindler's List" elements.

Since Richard Russo is a fairly accomplished author and screenwriter, I can pretty well determine that his workup of the novel is probably as good as it gets. In the wake of "Pearl Earring", it appears we have an author living off of the temporary popularity of that fad who has added a couple of tricks of the trade lifted from other works to 'individualize' her own story.

I'm not sure why Hallmark decided that this story was worth their largest budget in history. At any rate, the music was cloying, the Disney sets of the Netherlands only sometimes fooled the eye, and the acting was at times horrid (especially in the first flashback love story). The only redeeming quality in the movie was Glenn Close - and her bizarre judgment by the movie's 'moral arbiter', the new teacher at her school, left me feeling irritated. The threads and pieces of her 'cover-up' are far too intimate and intricate to be brushed off in a 2-minute end-of-film conversation with a teacher, and when she says 'conventional morality', their conversation stops being relevant and becomes just the latest manifestation of the TV-movie-of-the-week ethics coaching that serves us empty platitudes about life at the conclusion of poorly made dramas. Thanks, but no thanks.

The Holocaust, like WWs I and II and the Vietnam War, is a mine of material and has not yet been exhausted of its stories and lessons. But when these events are dredged merely for their sensationalism, when hacks piecemeal drama from a common horror because it's easy to use and difficult to criticize, that is lazy artistry. Such stories, and the very real periods of history that they recreate, require more time, more attention, and more effective handling. You don't get 'serious' just because you put your characters in the Holocaust. You have to do some homework.

The "Pearl Earring" worked because of its subtlety and visual sensuality. This film occasionally touches on the senses, but largely bags the eye candy in the efforts to cram a bunch of half-baked melodramas into 2 hours with commercials. Then again, coming from a card company that manufactures fake sentiments for people too busy to write their own, maybe this is the perfect and quintessential Hallmark film. Blah.