Review of Tulip Fever (2017) by Dottheeyes — 01 Sep 2017

This is an attractively mounted, but oddly flat and uninteresting picture. It bears signs of its extended, reportedly tortured post-production. It feels overly finessed, as if a thousand and one people, from unacknowledged editors to concerned financiers, watched rough cuts, and their every note—"this part is too long; speed it up," "this scene needs explanatory voice-over"—was heeded, rendering the final product a lurching beast with no emotional center. There is an enormous amount of plot here, coincidences and confrontations and desires and twists of fate (imagine acts four and five of Romeo and Juliet on steroids), but it whips along without ever being particularly involving, let alone moving. The Attractive Young Wife of an Much Older Merchant and the Intense, Penniless Young Painter fall sordidly in love within the space of a few scenes because of course those characters fall in love in this type of period melodrama, not because the actors have chemistry or because the relationship is in any way well-developed. There a few points worthy of at least modest praise: the recreation of a thronged, unsanitary 17th-century Amsterdam is an impressive feat of art direction, for example, and I was pleased to see Christoph Waltz's character, a deceived husband, never become more than slightly boorish, allowing the actor to play notes other than dastardly. The use of "tulip mania," a historical example of a sensational-then-ruinous speculative bubble, as an overarching context is also novel, if a bit convoluted. Unfortunately, there also points worthy of special criticism: Zach Galifianakis' involvement will be writ large in the annals of egregious miscasting, his every buffoonish scene a pain to endure.

At times, I found myself imagining the entire enterprise played as a comedy. Though it is presented as a deadly serious romantic drama, there is a sizable dose of A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy or Tom Jones (1963) in its DNA, with so many characters rolling around in the sheets and the whose-baby-is-it-anyway? subplot and Judi Dench as an abbess with sass.