Brush with Fate (2003)

I checked this out because of the cover. IN the opening scenes, Glenn Close acts so well I sat through the rest of the film, even though she did only the intro and the outro. Her eccentric, somewhat blind old academic was a stereotype, but I won't discuss it further because it would turn into a spoiler. Suffice to say, much of the movie that came after went a little over the top, full of exaggerated conflicts and exaggerated emotions. The interesting part of the film is the structure. It's an ass-backward way to doing history. I imagine Close's character, who narrates the stories to her colleague, opened one can of worms in her investigation only to raise a question about an earlier time, and so on, and that's how she tells the story. A little confusing at first, but when I figured it out, I spent time after making the connections.. That's how it runs, and in that way, it's interesting.

This is a fascinating film by Brent Shields which, although made for television, was largely shot on location in the Netherlands and must have had a substantial budget for a TV movie. The production values are very high, with excellent sets and costumes and wonderful old Dutch buildings used to great effect. The film has two spectacular performances, one by the amazing Glen Close, as you have never seen her before, and the other by the brilliant young British actress Kelly Macdonald, who was such a strong presence in the British TV series 'State of Play' and in various films since. There are many other fine performances as well, a number of them by Dutch actors unknown to those of us who do not wear clogs, eat pea soup, and pronounce strange vowels. The story is based upon the imagined existence of a lost Vermeer, which for the film was specially painted by a Dutch artist named Jonathan Janson, who succeeded admirably in imitating a Vermeer. The painting is of a girl wrapped in a cloak of hyacinth blue and sitting in the usual Vermeer room by window light. The film investigates the history of the painting through the centuries, in the manner of the famous film which follows the history of a violin, 'The Red Violin'. 'Brush with Fate' is rather a weak title, and must have depressed the DVD sales a lot. This film is really very charming and entrancing in many respects. There are some amazing twists in the story, which is a series of strange tales going back further and further in time until we discover who the girl was in the painting and have a lot of Vermeer himself in the story. The 'topper' in terms of plot twists is the extraordinary revelation at the ending. Anyone willing to sit through a film in which no one gets killed by machine guns, in which helicopters do not crash through skyscraper windows, in which people are not always pulling their clothes off so that the director can get excited, and who have some interest in art, would find this film interesting. It is also a very wonderful glimpse of the Netherlands of the past, and we see much more of it here than we do in 'Girl with the Pearl Earring'. Also, the film should be treasured as one of Glen Close's most bizarre roles, which she pulls off with true genius, and hence is a gem for those serious about great acting. As for Kelly Macdonald, she acts circles round everybody but Glen Close, and shows such fire and character that she sets the screen alight.

***SPOILERS AHEAD*** If there is a movie to be made about tracing the owners of a lost Vermeer to the present, this is not it. Of course, Glenn Close was wonderful as Cornelia, the mousy school teacher who brings the new art teacher to her house to see the Vermeer stolen by her Nazi father. That this woman would bring a total stranger to her house and risk her ill father's exposure and the painting's removal is only made plausible by Close's slightly insane performance. Would that there were more of it! Instead we are given several disjointed and not-very-involving stories of early owners of the painting. Not one of them shed any light on the punny title, "Brush With Fate". Brush--painting, get it? I was hoping for some connection with the art teacher and Vermeer, or have Cornelia and him be related in some way. But this shaggy dog story of a movie just left me wondering why I had wasted my time

I suffered through half this film before I switched to "Dr. Strangelove" on TCM. It is yet more proof that the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" has become hopelessly bad. Glenn Close misleadingly gets top billing, and delivers a magnificent performance, but she is in less than a third of the film. Her performance as an art enthusiast makes everyone else, including the usually reliable Ellyn Burstyn, seem even worse.The film, following the pattern of such films as "The Red Violin", tells the stories of several owners of a beautiful lost Vermeer painting through the centuries. Perhaps the producers of this mawkish telefilm were hoping that lightning would strike twice, but if so, they forgot the need for subtle writing and direction, which are both hopelessly sentimental and hardly above the level of soap opera in this film. Ms. Close, as if sensing this, gives a performance that wipes away everyone else. In fact, the acting, with the exception of Close, is uniformly bad, as if we were watching a bad daytime drama in period costume.The people who made this film obviously thought that by tackling an intellectual, sophisticated subject like a great Vermeer painting they could give the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" the class it once had, but they forgot to leave behind their recent tendency for corny writing and dramatics.