Brush with Fate (2003)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Simply A Masterpiece

Admirable film.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

I saw this movie for my Composition class last week. It is an adaptation of the Susan Vreeland novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue. In my opinion, the book is more effective than the movie, b/c parts are cut from the story, and it is changed a lot. Characters, situations, and even plot structure is twisted in the movie, while the book was much more linear. Characters like Rika are made to be more likable, and the end outcome of the story is completely changed. Glenn Close does play a good Cornelia, and she does play her character s it was portrayed in the book.The movie wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't watch it by choice. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I would read the book on my own either.

The only thing in which I concur with Sanchez Moreno is that Glenn Close has given us one of her very best performances in this movie. For the rest, I thought the story was interesting and at times touching and not badly played at all.

***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

Thomas Gibson is a new art teacher at a high school. Glenn Close is good as usual as a history teacher who invites Gibson to see a painting of a young girl at a table, which she believes to be a genuine Vermeer, and she tells him stories, which we see as flashbacks about the people who owned the painting in the past. All of the stories take place in Holland, and for the most part each story takes place earlier than the one preceding it. I have no idea what happened in the first story, from the late 1800s, except that it seemed to involve a romance and may have had flashbacks within flashbacks. At this point I was not enjoying the movie. Another story took place in the early 1700s when a baby was abandoned during a flood after a dike break. The painting accompanied the baby and was intended to be sold for the baby's expenses.Things got a little more interesting in the next story, which had some of the movie's few humorous moments. A man left a university to take a job working with the machinery used for the dikes. He got interested in a servant girl who was punished by being put in stocks, and their romance was not seen as a good idea. We find out in this story where the baby came from.The next story was very brief, but a woman, who was unsuccessful in bidding for the painting at an auction, seemed to know more about the painting than the auctioneer. The next story revealed how Vermeer came to paint the girl's picture, and this was somewhat more interesting than the rest of the movie. At this point we have seen relatively little of Gibson and Close, but it appears things will get better as they return. Gibson doubts the painting's authenticity, so one more story about Jews in 1942 is necessary. This was part of the 'Hallmark Hall of Fame' series, and I usually enjoy these movies, but I found this one to be a disappointment. The best things about the movie were probably the beautiful Dutch houses in the city, and the camera shots of windmills. But this was just not for me. Maybe others would enjoy it.