118 min | R | November 20, 2020 | TriStar Pictures
A Dutch forger sells fake Vermeers to the Nazis and gets charged with collaboration for it. His only defense is proving he is a liar. Guy Pearce has a blast. The movie around him does not.
In the wreckage of postwar Amsterdam, a Dutch investigator hunts down those who sold national treasures to the Nazis. One of his targets is Han van Meegeren, an art dealer who handed a Vermeer to Hermann Goering. The charge is collaboration, which carries a death sentence. Van Meegeren’s defense is that he painted the Vermeer himself. The film is a courtroom puzzle about authenticity, and it argues that the man who fooled the experts is more honest than the institutions that bought his lies.
Guy Pearce plays van Meegeren as a preening showman who treats his own trial as a stage. He delights in the contempt the art world holds for him because he has already beaten it. Pearce gives the forger a wounded vanity underneath the charm, a painter rejected by critics who took his revenge in counterfeit. Claes Bang plays investigator Joseph Piller with a soldier’s stiffness that never loosens. Vicky Krieps plays his assistant Minna Holmberg with a watchfulness the script never uses, and Roland Møller plays Piller’s muscle Esper Dekker as blunt force with no interior.
Dan Friedkin directs his first feature, working from a script by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and John Orloff. The production design dresses the rubble of Amsterdam in handsome browns and golds, and the camera lingers on the canvases as if the paintings carry the only real conviction in the room. Friedkin stages the trial scenes with flat coverage that drains the tension from the reversals. The score swells to tell the audience when to feel something the drama has not earned. The film looks expensive and moves like a procedural that has read the verdict in advance.
The problem is the gap between the two halves of the film. Every scene with van Meegeren crackles because Pearce understands that the man is a performance all the way down. Every scene without him reverts to a stiff investigation that treats a question about truth and forgery as a matter of paperwork. The material wants to be a debate about what makes a thing authentic. Friedkin films it as a case to be closed.