Justin Chadwick (2017)
Filming took place in mid-2014. Over three years later, after (presumably) a lot of re-cutting and serial changes of release date, Tulip Fever opened in the US to dire reviews. Fifteen more months went by before it limped into British cinemas. I failed to act on a vague intention to see the film then and hadn’t been looking out since for its appearance in television listings. I don’t know if the screening on BBC2 this May Bank Holiday was the TV premiere but the time slot was striking – immediately after transmission of the World Snooker Championship final. Setting an end time for that is a well-proven inexact science. Was the reasoning behind the scheduling ‘This movie is a dud – if the snooker goes down to the wire and we have to pull it no one will mind (and we’ll stick it on iPlayer anyway)’? At 10pm, when the film was due to start, the snooker was still going on. Half an hour or so later, the admirable Mark Selby had won his fourth world title and Tulip Fever, plagued by postponements throughout its life, could start without too much delay. Even so, I decided to watch it on iPlayer next day out of a mixture of curiosity and pity. The curiosity never disappeared – you always wonder how things went so wrong – though the pity soon turned to irritation.
Adapted from a 1999 novel of the same name by Deborah Moggach, Justin Chadwick’s romantic drama is set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam during the time of tulpenmanie (tulip mania) – when ‘contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed … [This] is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history’ (Wikipedia). Plonked into this historically specific context is a tangle of largely familiar plot lines. The beautiful Sophia (Alicia Vikander), raised in an orphanage, is married off to Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz), a wealthy widower who wants a child. He’s a bit past it and she fails to conceive. Things look up when Cornelis commissions a portrait to be painted and Sophia starts an affair with the artist, Jan van Loos (Dane DeHaan). Below stairs, housemaid Maria (Holliday Grainger) is having it off with Willem (Jack O’Connell), the local fishmonger. He makes a killing in the tulip market before being robbed of it and press-ganged into the bargain. When Maria discovers that (a) she’s with child, (b) Willem has disappeared and (c) her mistress is adulterous, the two women devise a daring plan. Sophia will pretend to be pregnant and, when the time comes, to die in childbirth. Once her body has been removed from her husband’s house, she’ll come back to life and run away with Jan, who, in the meantime, will have made his fortune in tulip bulbs. Unmarried mother Maria will thus be able to keep her job with Cornelis and – since a nurse will be needed – her baby too.
That’s not the half of it but it’s more than enough for this note – the load of plot is a main reason why Tulip Fever is both hectic and tiresome. It whizzes along but is so thinly textured that the effect is sometimes cartoonish. I’d guess Justin Chadwick shot much too much and couldn’t shape it. He may have been happy with what he saw in rushes but there are so many scenes and they’re mostly so short that there’s no kind of rhythm, either within individual sequences or in the narrative as a whole. The film is like a 107-minute trailer. Just occasionally, Chadwick manages to find a couple of bits of footage to stitch together agreeably. One morning Cornelis, the blithely unaware cuckold, leaves his house humming a merry tune. Cut to Sorgh (Tom Hollander), the unscrupulous, venal doctor who’s overseeing the fake pregnancy etc; he’s walking along, also humming contentedly. It’s a shame there isn’t a third leg to the humming relay.
There’s a lot of talent involved, behind and in front of the camera, which makes the resulting fiasco rather remarkable, as well as regrettable. It’s no surprise that the film’s visual scheme tries to evoke art of the Dutch Golden Age but the lighting, by the Danish cinematographer Eigild Bryld, is impressive, especially in the outdoor sequences. There are some fine interior compositions too but reliance on natural light sometimes makes indoors hard to make out, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the people on screen may be characters who hardly had time to register even when they were fully visible. Deborah Moggach (who also wrote, inter alia, the screenplay for the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice and the novel Ol Parker turned into The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) did the screenplay with, believe it or not, Tom Stoppard. Who knows how it compares with Moggach’s novel – or even how what ended up on screen compares with the script Moggach and Stoppard wrote. Explanations of tulpenmanie may have worked better in print; in the film, they’re don’t amount to much more than repeated eruptions of noisy, hand-held-camera frenzy in the dealing centre. As in the novel, there’s a first-person narrator but it’s Maria instead of Sophia. You can’t help wondering if Holliday Grainger’s voiceover was added during part of the lengthy editing process, as a futile attempt to give the narrative some coherence.
It will be clear from the names above that the film has quite a cast, and I’ve not yet mentioned the likes of Zach Galifianakis, Douglas Hodge, Joanna Scanlan – and Judi Dench. As the pragmatic, wily abbess of the convent orphanage where Sophia grew up, Dench shows how hard it is for her not to give a good performance – even when the odds are stacked against it. In the small role of a dressmaker, Joanna Scanlan does the same. Jack O’Connell and Holliday Grainger both blend humour with single-mindedness. You miss Willem when he’s carted off into the navy. It’s good to see him finally return to make an honest woman of Maria; there’s a flash forward to them and their brood a few years into the future. (It’s rather as if Cinderella lived happily ever after with Buttons and they had kids.) Except for the uncharismatic Dane DeHaan, none of the actors is weak but you feel with most of them – Alicia Vikander especially – that you’re watching extracts from a performance. Tulip Fever seems to have been a thoroughly ill-starred film. Even the place it has in Hollywood history is unenviable. This was the last movie to be theatrically released by the Weinstein Company.
4 May 2021
