We humans are often cruel to each other, but we’re never crueler than when we try to uphold society’s expectations for us. Order and stability and submission are required to keep the wheels of an affluent society greased. If we are to maintain material wealth, we have to squelch whatever personal urges we feel that would subvert the prestige of the world power to which we belong.
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| Photo credit: Tulip Fever/IMDb |
Tulip Fever, director Justin Chadwick’s (The Other Boleyn Girl) long-delayed adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel of the same title, finds itself situated at the intersection of carnal desire, marital obligations, and economic boom-and-bust cycles that keep people chained to society’s whims in 1630s Amsterdam. The story of Sophia Sandvoort (Alicia Vikander), a young orphan woman who bristles at having been sold into marriage to a wealthy middle-aged merchant named Cornelis (Christoph Waltz), is about the impossibility of living according to the crowd’s expectations forever.
Neither member of the marriage is outright mean to the other. They share an odd kind of warmth and occasional sweetness in their personal, day-to-day interactions with one another, but their fundamental differences arise in their nightly tragicomic attempts to conceive an heir to Cornelis’s fortune. (“I think my little soldier is ready,” the intermittently impotent Cornelis “reassures” Sophia and himself in a wry and expertly edited montage of their incompatible sexual drudgery.) They do not hate each other and they want each other to be as comfortable as possible. It is the situation, and the pressures placed on them by the suffocating high society world around them, that they hate.
But the thing about hating the system without doing anything to upend it is that you are effectively consigning yourself and those closest to you to a life of misery. By denying another’s desires, you guarantee that person will act out in ways harmful to all involved. If Tulip Fever could toss around in these roiling thematic waters for its entire runtime, it might be excellent, but alas, that is not to be.
Enter Jan Van Loos (Dane DeHaan), an up-and-coming painter and reckless economic speculator. (The tulips of the film’s title are literal aspects of the story because the 17th century Dutch’s obsession with pretty flowers mirrors 21st century Wall Street’s love of risky bets, thus providing another economic angle that shows how external forces can control our decisions.)
Cornelis thinks it’s a good idea to commission a portrait of him and his wife not because of any burning desire to support the arts or because he’s more vain than anyone else, as he repeats a couple times. Having portraits of yourself is just what one does when one is in a position of wealth like Cornelis. Jan finds reason after reason to return to the Sandvoort home because he quickly falls in love with Sophia for her beauty—and nothing else.
The movie gives them no reason to have a deeper connection. There is no inciting incident for their love beyond her being desperate and him being available. That would be rich storytelling material if the film examined the differences between love and lust, but it operates under the assumption that this is a solely tale of forbidden love. DeHaan cannot sell the love-lust complications and his chemistry with Vikander is almost nonexistent. Vikander deservedly won an Oscar for a film that was overall far inferior to this one (The Danish Girl), in which she was also asked to play with feelings about sex and love and compatibility, so it’s unlikely that the fault for these not-quite-believable scenes of Sophia and Jan being (without falling) in love lies at her feet.
Tulip Fever’s more traditional love story (re: people who seem to actually want to be with each other) is between the Sandvoorts’ live-in maid, Maria (Holliday Grainger), and the fishmonger who provides many of their meals, Willem (Jack O’Connell). The script, co-written by novel author Moggach and Tom Stoppard, fumbles its attempts to throw obstacles in the way of Maria’s and Willem’s happiness—there is a truly wretched and hamfisted mistaken-identity plot device that tears them apart for far too much of the film’s runtime. Eye-rollingly clunky contrivances aside, their star-crossed relationship provides the plot’s ignition, giving the movie forward momentum and a decent amount of tension in its last half hour. Thanks to Maria and Willem’s story, there are elements of a heist film baked into the back half of Tulip Fever that one may not expect going into the theater, so it isn’t all a waste.
But when one finishes a film thinking, “Hey, that wasn’t all a waste,” it’s not exactly what one had in mind when sitting down to view it. Tulip Fever has a number of things going for it, but it doesn’t spend enough time with its grand thematic concerns about the individual’s need to escape a system without a place for them. Instead, it leaves one just as stuck as its characters.
Director: Justin Chadwick
Writers: Deborah Moggach, Tom Stoppard
Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dane DeHaan, Jack O'Connell, Holliday Grainger, Christoph Waltz, Judi Dench, Cara Delevingne
Rating: 3/5 stars
Available in theaters now
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