Tim's Vermeer

Tim’s Vermeer is an ideal project for the cynical, prickly, and always-entertaining Penn and Teller. Though well-known for their magic, illusions, and comedy, in recent years the duo has become equally famous for investigating and debunking popular fads and beliefs.  In this film, the two men document their friend Tim Jenison's obsession with the 17th-century painter Johannes Vermeer, and specifically Jenison's theories as to how the Dutch master was able to paint compellingly photorealistic images a century and a half before the invention of photography. Jenison is an inventor and video engineer with an insatiably curious mind, and Penn and Teller document him over the course of many years as he develops his hypotheses and then painstakingly recreates every aspect of Vermeer’s working conditions to see if he can paint an equally impressive picture.

As a portrait of a brilliant, dogged, intellectual guy wrestling with an idea, the film works beautifully. It also intriguingly explores the different ways in which we view science and art. We follow Jenison’s distinctly empirical approach to understanding an artistic process, and, in doing so; we come to see the vast similarities between the creative and the intellectual brain. Penn and Teller are no strangers to such exploration, and in some ways, this could have been a feature-length episode of their television show Bullshit, in which they expose false beliefs and fraudulent popular theories. But Tim’s Vermeer is far superior to any of the Bullshit episodes I’ve seen because, as purveyors of truth, Penn and Teller often seem to forgo the kind of due diligence we would expect from journalists or documentarians. Their television show usually presents only the most kooky-seeming practitioners of various fads and pseudoscience, rather than taking on articulate proponents that could more cogently argue their positions. And Penn and Teller's experiments and exposés are often anecdotal rather than scientific, which severely undercuts the power of their arguments. Tim's Vermeer succeeds because they are less concerned with exposing a lie than in presenting one man’s theory and then watching that man attempt to prove it through a fascinating and painstaking effort.