Tulip Fever (2017)
Directed by Justin Chadwick
Written by Deborah Moggach, Tom Stoppard
Starring Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O'Connell, Tom Hollander, Christoph Waltz
Release Date September 1st, 2017
Published August 31st, 2017
Tulip Fever tells the story of an orphan girl named Sophia who is plucked from a Dutch orphanage to become the wife/concubine of a rich trader named Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz). Sophia’s life is a relatively dull routine but nothing she really notices as, aside from the orphanage, it’s all she’s ever known. Sophia’s worldview changes when the outside world comes crashing into her secluded domesticity in the form of a lusty painter named Jan Van Loos (Dane Dehaan) who awakens the kind of desire within Sophia that her arranged marriage could never possibly create.
Not a bad story? So why is Tulip Fever such silly nonsense? It’s illogical. Director Justin Chadwick covered similar period drama lustiness in The Other Boleyn Girl to fine effect and Tom Stoppard won an Academy Award for writing Shakespeare in Love and also wrote Brazil and Empire of the Sun. Add to this the rising star Alicia Vikander, two time Academy Award winner Christoph Waltz and the ingredients are here for an incredible film. Tulip Fever even has Academy Award winner Judi Dench and it’s still a miserable sit.
The simple fact is that the simple plot I described has been done to death. Stoppard’s own Shakespeare in Love is little more than a less haughty and more prestigious version of this same story. To attempt to escape the notion that the film is a poor copy of previous period movies, Tulip Fever adds two more characters and convoluted plot about faked pregnancy and a faked death and while the plot wheels spin in desperate effort to avoid repeating period cliché we in the audience grow ever more weary of the whirring, blurring silliness of the plot.
Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger play Willem and Maria. Maria is Sophia’s servant and Willem is the local fish-monger. They’ve fallen madly and love and Willem has a plan for them to escape servitude. Willem is entering the high stakes trade of Tulips which have become the hottest commodity in all of Denmark at this time. When Willem comes into luck, growing a rare Tulip that could get he and Maria out of their poverty only the lame contrivance of the plot can intervene and boy does it.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media
