PG-13 | 1h 20m | Documentary, Art History | 2014
It’s not often when art, science, and sleight-of-hand cross paths in a documentary film, and when you find out the premise behind “Tim’s Vermeer,” your first reaction might be a gaping yawn. But once the particulars and participants are introduced, you’ll do an about-face and say, “Wow, that’s way too cool.”
The Hockney-Falco Thesis
After some initial investigating, Mr. Jenison became very familiar with the Hockney-Falco thesis and its various offshoot theories, which attribute the “perfectness” of composition found in works of the era in part to cameras, mirrors, and other forms of optic enhancement. Considering that this was at least 200 years before the invention of what we know to be a camera, this is a very interesting and, some may say, inflammatory type of conclusion.
No strangers themselves to the art of making things appear as they are not, the magic team of Penn Jillette and a man who goes by the mononym Teller decided to chronicle Mr. Jenison’s five-year quest to employ some of the artists’ instruments that were available at the time to Vermeer and his contemporaries. They documented how Mr. Jenison created a copy of “The Music Lesson,” aka “A Lady at the Virginals With a Gentleman,” which currently hangs in Buckingham Palace.
An Expensive Experiment
Liquidating a huge chunk of his considerable fortune in the process, Mr. Jenison went to painstaking detail in the creation of a duplicate life-sized set, mixed his own oil paints from scratch, and with one exception never used anything that wasn’t around 400 years ago. That exception? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out, but it won’t be giving anything away to reveal that Mr. Jenison also created it from scratch.
For much of the second half of the film, Mr. Jenison and the audience literally “watch paint dry,” but don’t get the idea that it is in any way dull or tedious. If you’ve ever witnessed a Penn & Teller show, you’re already keenly aware that the set-ups to their tricks can often be thunderously mundane and simple, which of course makes the final reveal all that more astonishing.
Don’t Pass Judgment
One of the many great aspects of the movie, and also the cardinal rule for all documentary films, is to not pass judgment on the subject at hand. On that level, Teller succeeds admirably. The process that Vermeer might have used should not take anything away from what he achieved, and that goes for Mr. Jenison as well.
“Tim’s Vermeer” is “The Da Vinci Code” minus all of the abject religious hyperbole and superfluous flummery, but with more authentic and organic drama. It’s a movie for people who like to get into the heads of complicated, creative people, and figure out what makes them tick. In their own very different ways, Vermeer and Mr. Jenison are two guys cut from the same artistic and creative cloth, albeit four centuries apart.
