The Last Vermeer: Fascinating True-Life Story Underserved by Middling Drama

By Karen Gordon

Rating: C

There is a terrific movie to be made about the trial of Han Van Meegeren, one of the most successful art forgers in history, who made millions selling his paintings to rich and prominent Nazis during the Second World War. Unfortunately, The Last Vermeer isn’t it.

The film is the directorial debut of Dan Friedkin, who is an experienced producer. It’s based on Jonathon Lopez’s non-fiction book The Man Who Made Vermeers and is focused around Captain Joesph Piller (played by Claes Bang) who played a major role in Van Meegeren’s post-war life.

The Last Vermeer begins weeks after the fall of the Third Reich, and is set in Amsterdam, which is under the control of the Allied Provisional Government. Captain Piller is working with the Canadian military and assigned to track art looted by the Nazis back to the individuals who were the middlemen who sold the stolen works to the enemy. Once revealed, they’re jailed and tried.

If found guilty, collaborators face execution by firing squad in area set up in the town’s main square. This is an intense time.

When the film begins, Minna Holmberg (Vicky Krieps) — Piller’s former colleague in the Dutch resistance, now his assistant in these missions — and a team discover a cache of stolen art in a sewer belonging to Hermann Goring, including a Vermeer.

Fortunately, there’s paperwork that ultimately leads Piller to Han Van Meegeren, an effete man of obvious wealth, with an offhand, bohemian manner, played by Guy Pearce. He seems not only unfazed by Piller and his team’s showing up at his door and their investigation, but ready and willing to give them names to help trace the route of the underground art dealers who sold art to the Nazis.

He is also helping them find evidence that will support his assertion that he only sold fakes to bilk Nazis, including selling a fake Vermeer to Goring for a staggering amount of money.

There’s an element of racing against the clock for other problems. The Dutch are putting their government back together and are looking to take over this and other cases. Piller also has some romantic drama, between his wife and his comely assistant.

The film is structured like an episode of TV’s Law & Order. In the first half of the film, Piller follows a number of leads to try and to get to the truth. The second hour is a courtroom drama, as Piller, who is not a lawyer, defends Van Meegeren from charges that he was a Nazi collaborator.

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A big part of Van Meegeren’s fate hinges on whether the art in question really is recently discovered Vermeer masterpiece or a fake. In a collaborator’s trial, a fake could be seen to mean that Van Meegeren actually conned the Nazis, and therefore was an opportunist and a con man, but not a collaborator. And as part of this the film gives us lessons in how art forgers create works of art that can fool experts and end up in museums around the world.

It’s factually interesting. And the film clearly has good intentions. Choosing to focus on Piller, a man of principal, instead of the crooked, yet fascinating criminal Van Meegeren is a statement in itself.

The film also uses subtext in the form of relationship dramas to look at some of the personal complications of people coming together in peacetime after such a horrible period of war. Piller, a Jewish man, went into the resistance separating from his wife for the period of the war, and now he’s doggedly focused on this investigative work, on rooting out the enablers, but he’s struggling to relate to her, to accept her role during the war.

But all of these good intentions can’t make up for a film that never quite catches fire emotionally. Nothing really gets under the skin. Piller’s story is flat as a pancake. Even when it comes to his personal life. The man is all stoic resolve or crisp efficiency with no emotional evidence that he’s just been through a war. Pearce’s Van Meeregen is played broadly, arguably distractingly so, but again not revealing much below the surface.

As well, there’s little in the first half of the movie that informs the courtroom action.

We’re not really given enough of an understanding of some of the things that could have played into making this dramatic. The script instead feels overstuffed and slightly confusing. There is enough drama in this story but Friedkin doesn’t really find it.

The Last Vermeer. Directed by Dan Friedkin. Starring Guy Pearce, Claes Bang and Vicky Krieps. Opens November 20 in select theatres across Canada.